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+Worldly Ways and Byways
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+by Eliot Gregory
+
+December, 1995  [Etext #379]
+
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+Worldly Ways and Byways - Eliot Gregory.  1899 edition.  Scanned and 
+proofed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+***
+
+
+
+
+Worldly Ways and Byways
+
+
+
+
+
+A Table of Contents
+
+To the READER
+
+1.  Charm
+2.  The Moth and the Star
+3.  Contrasted Travelling
+4.  The Outer and the Inner Woman
+5.  On Some Gilded Misalliances
+6.  The Complacency of Mediocrity
+7.  The Discontent of Talent
+8.  Slouch
+9.  Social Suggestion
+10. Bohemia
+11. Social Exiles
+12. "Seven Ages" of Furniture
+13. Our Elite and Public Life
+14. The Small Summer Hotel
+15. A False Start
+16. A Holy Land
+17. Royalty at Play
+18. A Rock Ahead
+19. The Grand Prix
+20. "The Treadmill"
+21. "Like Master Like Man"
+22. An English Invasion of the Riviera
+23. A Common Weakness
+24. Changing Paris
+25. Contentment
+26. The Climber
+27. The Last of the Dandies
+28. A Nation on the Wing
+29. Husks
+30. The Faubourg St. Germain
+31. Men's Manners
+32. An Ideal Hostess
+33. The Introducer
+34. A Question and an Answer
+35. Living on Your Friends
+36. American Society in Italy
+37. The Newport of the Past
+38. A Conquest of Europe
+39. A Race of Slaves
+40. Introspection
+
+
+
+
+To the Reader
+
+
+THERE existed formerly, in diplomatic circles, a curious custom, 
+since fallen into disuse, entitled the Pele Mele, contrived 
+doubtless by some distracted Master of Ceremonies to quell the 
+endless jealousies and quarrels for precedence between courtiers 
+and diplomatists of contending pretensions.  Under this rule no 
+rank was recognized, each person being allowed at banquet, fete, or 
+other public ceremony only such place as he had been ingenious or 
+fortunate enough to obtain.
+
+Any one wishing to form an idea of the confusion that ensued, of 
+the intrigues and expedients resorted to, not only in procuring 
+prominent places, but also in ensuring the integrity of the Pele 
+Mele, should glance over the amusing memoirs of M. de Segur.
+
+The aspiring nobles and ambassadors, harassed by this constant 
+preoccupation, had little time or inclination left for any serious 
+pursuit, since, to take a moment's repose or an hour's breathing 
+space was to risk falling behind in the endless and aimless race.  
+Strange as it may appear, the knowledge that they owed place and 
+preferment more to chance or intrigue than to any personal merit or 
+inherited right, instead of lessening the value of the prizes for 
+which all were striving, seemed only to enhance them in the eyes of 
+the competitors.
+
+Success was the unique standard by which they gauged their fellows.  
+Those who succeeded revelled in the adulation of their friends, but 
+when any one failed, the fickle crowd passed him by to bow at more 
+fortunate feet.
+
+No better picture could be found of the "world" of to-day, a 
+perpetual Pele Mele, where such advantages only are conceded as we 
+have been sufficiently enterprising to obtain, and are strong or 
+clever enough to keep - a constant competition, a daily 
+steeplechase, favorable to daring spirits and personal initiative 
+but with the defect of keeping frail humanity ever on the qui vive.
+
+Philosophers tell us, that we should seek happiness only in the 
+calm of our own minds, not allowing external conditions or the 
+opinions of others to influence our ways.  This lofty detachment 
+from environment is achieved by very few.  Indeed, the philosophers 
+themselves (who may be said to have invented the art of "posing") 
+were generally as vain as peacocks, profoundly pre-occupied with 
+the verdict of their contemporaries and their position as regards 
+posterity.
+
+Man is born gregarious and remains all his life a herding animal.  
+As one keen observer has written, "So great is man's horror of 
+being alone that he will seek the society of those he neither likes 
+nor respects sooner than be left to his own."  The laws and 
+conventions that govern men's intercourse have, therefore, formed a 
+tempting subject for the writers of all ages.  Some have labored 
+hoping to reform their generation, others have written to offer 
+solutions for life's many problems.
+
+Beaumarchais, whose penetrating wit left few subjects untouched, 
+makes his Figaro put the subject aside with "Je me presse de rire 
+de tout, de peur d'etre oblige d'en pleurer."
+
+The author of this little volume pretends to settle no disputes, 
+aims at inaugurating no reforms.  He has lightly touched on passing 
+topics and jotted down, "to point a moral or adorn a tale," some of 
+the more obvious foibles and inconsistencies of our American ways.  
+If a stray bit of philosophy has here and there slipped in between 
+the lines, it is mostly of the laughing "school," and used more in 
+banter than in blame.
+
+This much abused "world" is a fairly agreeable place if you do not 
+take it seriously.  Meet it with a friendly face and it will smile 
+gayly back at you, but do not ask of it what it cannot give, or 
+attribute to its verdicts more importance than they deserve.
+
+ELIOT GREGORY
+
+Newport, November first, 1897
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 1 - Charm
+
+
+WOMEN endowed by nature with the indescribable quality we call 
+"charm" (for want of a better word), are the supreme development of 
+a perfected race, the last word, as it were, of civilization; the 
+flower of their kind, crowning centuries of growing refinement and 
+cultivation.  Other women may unite a thousand brilliant qualities, 
+and attractive attributes, may be beautiful as Astarte or witty as 
+Madame de Montespan, those endowed with the power of charm, have in 
+all ages and under every sky, held undisputed rule over the hearts 
+of their generation.
+
+When we look at the portraits of the enchantresses whom history 
+tells us have ruled the world by their charm, and swayed the 
+destinies of empires at their fancy, we are astonished to find that 
+they have rarely been beautiful.  From Cleopatra or Mary of 
+Scotland down to Lola Montez, the tell-tale coin or canvas reveals 
+the same marvellous fact.  We wonder how these women attained such 
+influence over the men of their day, their husbands or lovers.  We 
+would do better to look around us, or inward, and observe what is 
+passing in our own hearts.
+
+Pause, reader mine, a moment and reflect.  Who has held the first 
+place in your thoughts, filled your soul, and influenced your life?  
+Was she the most beautiful of your acquaintances, the radiant 
+vision that dazzled your boyish eyes?  Has she not rather been some 
+gentle, quiet woman whom you hardly noticed the first time your 
+paths crossed, but who gradually grew to be a part of your life - 
+to whom you instinctively turned for consolation in moments of 
+discouragement, for counsel in your difficulties, and whose welcome 
+was the bright moment in your day, looked forward to through long 
+hours of toil and worry?
+
+In the hurly-burly of life we lose sight of so many things our 
+fathers and mothers clung to, and have drifted so far away from 
+their gentle customs and simple, home-loving habits, that one 
+wonders what impression our society would make on a woman of a 
+century ago, could she by some spell be dropped into the swing of 
+modern days.  The good soul would be apt to find it rather a far 
+cry from the quiet pleasures of her youth, to "a ladies' amateur 
+bicycle race" that formed the attraction recently at a summer 
+resort.
+
+That we should have come to think it natural and proper for a young 
+wife and mother to pass her mornings at golf, lunching at the club-
+house to "save time," returning home only for a hurried change of 
+toilet to start again on a bicycle or for a round of calls, an 
+occupation that will leave her just the half-hour necessary to slip 
+into a dinner gown, and then for her to pass the evening in dancing 
+or at the card-table, shows, when one takes the time to think of 
+it, how unconsciously we have changed, and (with all apologies to 
+the gay hostesses and graceful athletes of to-day) not for the 
+better.
+
+It is just in the subtle quality of charm that the women of the 
+last ten years have fallen away from their elder sisters.  They 
+have been carried along by a love of sport, and by the set of 
+fashion's tide, not stopping to ask themselves whither they are 
+floating.  They do not realize all the importance of their acts nor 
+the true meaning of their metamorphosis.
+
+The dear creatures should be content, for they have at last escaped 
+from the bondage of ages, have broken their chains, and vaulted 
+over their prison walls.  "Lords and masters" have gradually become 
+very humble and obedient servants, and the "love, honour, and obey" 
+of the marriage service might now more logically be spoken by the 
+man; on the lips of the women of to-day it is but a graceful "FACON 
+DE PARLER," and holds only those who choose to be bound.
+
+It is not my intention to rail against the short-comings of the 
+day.  That ungrateful task I leave to sterner moralists, and 
+hopeful souls who naively imagine they can stem the current of an 
+epoch with the barrier of their eloquence, or sweep back an ocean 
+of innovations by their logic.  I should like, however, to ask my 
+sisters one question: Are they quite sure that women gain by these 
+changes?  Do they imagine, these "sporty" young females in short-
+cut skirts and mannish shirts and ties, that it is seductive to a 
+lover, or a husband to see his idol in a violent perspiration, her 
+draggled hair blowing across a sunburned face, panting up a long 
+hill in front of him on a bicycle, frantic at having lost her race?  
+Shade of gentle William! who said
+
+
+A woman moved, is like a fountain troubled, -
+Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.
+And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
+Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
+
+
+Is the modern girl under the impression that men will be contented 
+with poor imitations of themselves, to share their homes and be the 
+mothers of their children?  She is throwing away the substance for 
+the shadow!
+
+The moment women step out from the sanctuary of their homes, the 
+glamour that girlhood or maternity has thrown around them cast 
+aside, that moment will they cease to rule mankind.  Women may 
+agitate until they have obtained political recognition, but will 
+awake from their foolish dream of power, realizing too late what 
+they have sacrificed to obtain it, that the price has been very 
+heavy, and the fruit of their struggles bitter on their lips.
+
+There are few men, I imagine, of my generation to whom the words 
+"home" and "mother" have not a penetrating charm, who do not look 
+back with softened heart and tender thoughts to fireside scenes of 
+evening readings and twilight talks at a mother's knee, realizing 
+that the best in their natures owes its growth to these influences.
+
+I sometimes look about me and wonder what the word "mother" will 
+mean later, to modern little boys.  It will evoke, I fear, a 
+confused remembrance of some centaur-like being, half woman, half 
+wheel, or as it did to neglected little Rawdon Crawley, the vision 
+of a radiant creature in gauze and jewels, driving away to endless 
+FETES - FETES followed by long mornings, when he was told not to 
+make any noise, or play too loudly, "as poor mamma is resting."  
+What other memories can the "successful" woman of to-day hope to 
+leave in the minds of her children?  If the child remembers his 
+mother in this way, will not the man who has known and perhaps 
+loved her, feel the same sensation of empty futility when her name 
+is mentioned?
+
+The woman who proposes a game of cards to a youth who comes to pass 
+an hour in her society, can hardly expect him to carry away a 
+particularly tender memory of her as he leaves the house.  The girl 
+who has rowed, ridden, or raced at a man's side for days, with the 
+object of getting the better of him at some sport or pastime, 
+cannot reasonably hope to be connected in his thoughts with ideas 
+more tender or more elevated than "odds" or "handicaps," with an 
+undercurrent of pique if his unsexed companion has "downed" him 
+successfully.
+
+What man, unless he be singularly dissolute or unfortunate, but 
+turns his steps, when he can, towards some dainty parlor where he 
+is sure of finding a smiling, soft-voiced woman, whose welcome he 
+knows will soothe his irritated nerves and restore the even balance 
+of his temper, whose charm will work its subtle way into his 
+troubled spirit?  The wife he loves, or the friend he admires and 
+respects, will do more for him in one such quiet hour when two 
+minds commune, coming closer to the real man, and moving him to 
+braver efforts, and nobler aims, than all the beauties and "sporty" 
+acquaintances of a lifetime.  No matter what a man's education or 
+taste is, none are insensible to such an atmosphere or to the grace 
+and witchery a woman can lend to the simplest surroundings.  She 
+need not be beautiful or brilliant to hold him in lifelong 
+allegiance, if she but possess this magnetism.
+
+Madame Recamier was a beautiful, but not a brilliant woman, yet she 
+held men her slaves for years.  To know her was to fall under her 
+charm, and to feel it once was to remain her adorer for life.  She 
+will go down to history as the type of a fascinating woman.  Being 
+asked once by an acquaintance what spell she worked on mankind that 
+enabled her to hold them for ever at her feet, she laughingly 
+answered:
+
+"I have always found two words sufficient.  When a visitor comes 
+into my salon, I say, 'ENFIN!' and when he gets up to go away, I 
+say, 'DEJA!' "
+
+"What is this wonderful 'charm' he is writing about?"  I hear some 
+sprightly maiden inquire as she reads these lines.  My dear young 
+lady, if you ask the question, you have judged yourself and been 
+found wanting.  But to satisfy you as far as I can, I will try and 
+define it - not by telling you what it is; that is beyond my power 
+- but by negatives, the only way in which subtle subjects can be 
+approached.
+
+A woman of charm is never flustered and never DISTRAITE.  She talks 
+little, and rarely of herself, remembering that bores are persons 
+who insist on talking about themselves.  She does not break the 
+thread of a conversation by irrelevant questions or confabulate in 
+an undertone with the servants.  No one of her guests receives more 
+of her attention than another and none are neglected.  She offers 
+to each one who speaks the homage of her entire attention.  She 
+never makes an effort to be brilliant or entertain with her wit.  
+She is far too clever for that.  Neither does she volunteer 
+information nor converse about her troubles or her ailments, nor 
+wander off into details about people you do not know.
+
+She is all things - to each man she likes, in the best sense of 
+that phrase, appreciating his qualities, stimulating him to better 
+things.
+
+
+- for his gayer hours
+She has a voice of gladness and a smile and eloquence of beauty; 
+and she glides
+Into his darker musings with a mild and healing sympathy that 
+steals away
+Their sharpness ere he is aware.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 2 - The Moth and the Star
+
+
+THE truth of the saying that "it is always the unexpected that 
+happens," receives in this country a confirmation from an unlooked-
+for quarter, as does the fact of human nature being always, 
+discouragingly, the same in spite of varied surroundings.  This 
+sounds like a paradox, but is an exceedingly simple statement 
+easily proved.
+
+That the great mass of Americans, drawn as they are from such 
+varied sources, should take any interest in the comings and goings 
+or social doings of a small set of wealthy and fashionable people, 
+is certainly an unexpected development.  That to read of the 
+amusements and home life of a clique of people with whom they have 
+little in common, whose whole education and point of view are 
+different from their own, and whom they have rarely seen and never 
+expect to meet, should afford the average citizen any amusement 
+seems little short of impossible.
+
+One accepts as a natural sequence that abroad (where an hereditary 
+nobility have ruled for centuries, and accustomed the people to 
+look up to them as the visible embodiment of all that is splendid 
+and unattainable in life) such interest should exist.  That the 
+home-coming of an English or French nobleman to his estates should 
+excite the enthusiasm of hundreds more or less dependent upon him 
+for their amusement or more material advantages; that his marriage 
+to an heiress - meaning to them the re-opening of a long-closed 
+CHATEAU and the beginning of a period of prosperity for the 
+district - should excite his neighbors is not to be wondered at.
+
+It is well known that whole regions have been made prosperous by 
+the residence of a court, witness the wealth and trade brought into 
+Scotland by the Queen's preference for "the Land of Cakes," and the 
+discontent and poverty in Ireland from absenteeism and persistent 
+avoidance of that country by the court.  But in this land, where 
+every reason for interesting one class in another seems lacking, 
+that thousands of well-to-do people (half the time not born in this 
+hemisphere), should delightedly devour columns of incorrect 
+information about New York dances and Lenox house-parties, winter 
+cruises, or Newport coaching parades, strikes the observer as the 
+"unexpected" in its purest form.
+
+That this interest exists is absolutely certain.  During a trip in 
+the West, some seasons ago, I was dumbfounded to find that the 
+members of a certain New York set were familiarly spoken of by 
+their first names, and was assailed with all sorts of eager 
+questions when it was discovered that I knew them.  A certain young 
+lady, at that time a belle in New York, was currently called SALLY, 
+and a well-known sportsman FRED, by thousands of people who had 
+never seen either of them.  It seems impossible, does it not?  Let 
+us look a little closer into the reason of this interest, and we 
+shall find how simple is the apparent paradox.
+
+Perhaps in no country, in all the world, do the immense middle 
+classes lead such uninteresting lives, and have such limited 
+resources at their disposal for amusement or the passing of leisure 
+hours.
+
+Abroad the military bands play constantly in the public parks; the 
+museums and palaces are always open wherein to pass rainy Sunday 
+afternoons; every village has its religious FETES and local fair, 
+attended with dancing and games.  All these mental relaxations are 
+lacking in our newer civilization; life is stripped of everything 
+that is not distinctly practical; the dull round of weekly toil is 
+only broken by the duller idleness of an American Sunday.  
+Naturally, these people long for something outside of themselves 
+and their narrow sphere.
+
+Suddenly there arises a class whose wealth permits them to break 
+through the iron circle of work and boredom, who do picturesque and 
+delightful things, which appeal directly to the imagination; they 
+build a summer residence complete, in six weeks, with furniture and 
+bric-a-brac, on the top of a roadless mountain; they sail in 
+fairylike yachts to summer seas, and marry their daughters to the 
+heirs of ducal houses; they float up the Nile in dahabeeyah, or 
+pass the "month of flowers" in far Japan.
+
+It is but human nature to delight in reading of these things.  Here 
+the great mass of the people find (and eagerly seize on), the 
+element of romance lacking in their lives, infinitely more 
+enthralling than the doings of any novel's heroine.  It is real!  
+It is taking place! and - still deeper reason - in every ambitious 
+American heart lingers the secret hope that with luck and good 
+management they too may do those very things, or at least that 
+their children will enjoy the fortunes they have gained, in just 
+those ways.  The gloom of the monotonous present is brightened, the 
+patient toiler returns to his desk with something definite before 
+him - an objective point - towards which he can struggle; he knows 
+that this is no impossible dream.  Dozens have succeeded and prove 
+to him what energy and enterprise can accomplish.
+
+Do not laugh at this suggestion; it is far truer than you imagine.  
+Many a weary woman has turned from such reading to her narrow 
+duties, feeling that life is not all work, and with renewed hope in 
+the possibilities of the future.
+
+Doubtless a certain amount of purely idle curiosity is mingled with 
+the other feelings.  I remember quite well showing our city sights 
+to a bored party of Western friends, and failing entirely to amuse 
+them, when, happening to mention as we drove up town, "there goes 
+Mr. Blank," (naming a prominent leader of cotillions), my guests 
+nearly fell over each other and out of the carriage in their 
+eagerness to see the gentleman of whom they had read so much, and 
+who was, in those days, a power in his way, and several times after 
+they expressed the greatest satisfaction at having seen him.
+
+I have found, with rare exceptions, and the experience has been 
+rather widely gathered all over the country, that this interest - 
+or call it what you will - has been entirely without spite or 
+bitterness, rather the delight of a child in a fairy story.  For 
+people are rarely envious of things far removed from their grasp.  
+You will find that a woman who is bitter because her neighbor has a 
+girl "help" or a more comfortable cottage, rarely feels envy 
+towards the owners of opera-boxes or yachts.  Such heart-burnings 
+(let us hope they are few) are among a class born in the shadow of 
+great wealth, and bred up with tastes that they can neither 
+relinquish nor satisfy.  The large majority of people show only a 
+good-natured inclination to chaff, none of the "class feeling" 
+which certain papers and certain politicians try to excite.  
+Outside of the large cities with their foreign-bred, semi-
+anarchistic populations, the tone is perfectly friendly; for the 
+simple reason that it never entered into the head of any American 
+to imagine that there WAS any class difference.  To him his rich 
+neighbors are simply his lucky neighbors, almost his relations, 
+who, starting from a common stock, have been able to "get there" 
+sooner than he has done.  So he wishes them luck on the voyage in 
+which he expects to join them as soon as he has had time to make a 
+fortune.
+
+So long as the world exists, or at least until we have reformed it 
+and adopted Mr. Bellamy's delightful scheme of existence as 
+described in "Looking Backward," great fortunes will be made, and 
+painful contrasts be seen, especially in cities, and it would seem 
+to be the duty of the press to soften - certainly not to sharpen - 
+the edge of discontent.  As long as human nature is human nature, 
+and the poor care to read of the doings of the more fortunate, by 
+all means give them the reading they enjoy and demand, but let it 
+be written in a kindly spirit so that it may be a cultivation as 
+well as a recreation.  Treat this perfectly natural and honest 
+taste honestly and naturally, for, after all, it is
+
+
+The desire of the moth for the star,
+Of the night for the morrow.
+The devotion to something afar
+From the sphere of our sorrow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 3 - Contrasted Travelling
+
+
+WHEN our parents went to Europe fifty years ago, it was the event 
+of a lifetime - a tour lovingly mapped out in advance with advice 
+from travelled friends.  Passports were procured, books read, wills 
+made, and finally, prayers were offered up in church and solemn 
+leave-taking performed.  Once on the other side, descriptive 
+letters were conscientiously written, and eagerly read by friends 
+at home, - in spite of these epistles being on the thinnest of 
+paper and with crossing carried to a fine art, for postage was high 
+in the forties.  Above all, a journal was kept.
+
+Such a journal lies before me as I write.  Four little volumes in 
+worn morocco covers and faded "Italian" writing, more precious than 
+all my other books combined, their sight recalls that lost time - 
+my youth - when, as a reward, they were unlocked that I might look 
+at the drawings, and the sweetest voice in the world would read to 
+me from them!  Happy, vanished days, that are so far away they seem 
+to have been in another existence!
+
+The first volume opens with the voyage across the Atlantic, made in 
+an American clipper (a model unsurpassed the world over), which was 
+accomplished in thirteen days, a feat rarely equalled now, by sail.  
+Genial Captain Nye was in command.  The same who later, when a 
+steam propelled vessel was offered him, refused, as unworthy of a 
+seaman, "to boil a kettle across the ocean."
+
+Life friendships were made in those little cabins, under the 
+swinging lamp the travellers re-read last volumes so as to be 
+prepared to appreciate everything on landing.  Ireland, England and 
+Scotland were visited with an enthusiasm born of Scott, the tedium 
+of long coaching journeys being beguiled by the first "numbers" of 
+"Pickwick," over which the men of the party roared, but which the 
+ladies did not care for, thinking it vulgar, and not to be compared 
+to "Waverley," "Thaddeus of Warsaw," or "The Mysteries of Udolpho."
+
+A circular letter to our diplomatic agents abroad was presented in 
+each city, a rite invariably followed by an invitation to dine, for 
+which occasions a black satin frock with a low body and a few 
+simple ornaments, including (supreme elegance) a diamond cross, 
+were carried in the trunks.  In London a travelling carriage was 
+bought and stocked, the indispensable courier engaged, half guide, 
+half servant, who was expected to explore a city, or wait at table, 
+as occasion required.  Four days were passed between Havre and 
+Paris, and the slow progress across Europe was accomplished, Murray 
+in one hand and Byron in the other.
+
+One page used particularly to attract my boyish attention.  It was 
+headed by a naive little drawing of the carriage at an Italian inn 
+door, and described how, after the dangers and discomforts of an 
+Alpine pass, they descended by sunny slopes into Lombardy.  Oh! the 
+rapture that breathes from those simple pages!  The vintage scenes, 
+the mid-day halt for luncheon eaten in the open air, the afternoon 
+start, the front seat of the carriage heaped with purple grapes, 
+used to fire my youthful imagination and now recalls Madame de 
+Stael's line on perfect happiness: "To be young! to be in love! to 
+be in Italy!"
+
+Do people enjoy Europe as much now?  I doubt it!  It has become too 
+much a matter of course, a necessary part of the routine of life.  
+Much of the bloom is brushed from foreign scenes by descriptive 
+books and photographs, that St. Mark's or Mt. Blanc has become as 
+familiar to a child's eye as the house he lives in, and in 
+consequence the reality now instead of being a revelation is often 
+a disappointment.
+
+In my youth, it was still an event to cross.  I remember my first 
+voyage on the old side-wheeled SCOTIA, and Captain Judkins in a 
+wheeled chair, and a perpetual bad temper, being pushed about the 
+deck; and our delight, when the inevitable female asking him (three 
+days out) how far we were from land, got the answer "about a mile!"
+
+"Indeed!  How interesting!  In which direction?"
+
+"In that direction, madam," shouted the captain, pointing downward 
+as he turned his back to her.
+
+If I remember, we were then thirteen days getting to Liverpool, and 
+made the acquaintance on board of the people with whom we travelled 
+during most of that winter.  Imagine anyone now making an 
+acquaintance on board a steamer!  In those simple days people 
+depended on the friendships made at summer hotels or boarding-
+houses for their visiting list.  At present, when a girl comes out, 
+her mother presents her to everybody she will be likely to know if 
+she were to live a century.  In the seventies, ladies cheerfully 
+shared their state-rooms with women they did not know, and often 
+became friends in consequence; but now, unless a certain deck-suite 
+can be secured, with bath and sitting-room, on one or two 
+particular "steamers," the great lady is in despair.  Yet our 
+mothers were quite as refined as the present generation, only they 
+took life simply, as they found it.
+
+Children are now taken abroad so young, that before they have 
+reached an age to appreciate what they see, Europe has become to 
+them a twice-told tale.  So true is this, that a receipt for making 
+children good Americans is to bring them up abroad.  Once they get 
+back here it is hard to entice them away again.
+
+With each improvement in the speed of our steamers, something of 
+the glamour of Europe vanishes.  The crowds that yearly rush across 
+see and appreciate less in a lifetime than our parents did in their 
+one tour abroad.  A good lady of my acquaintance was complaining 
+recently how much Paris bored her.
+
+"What can you do to pass the time?" she asked.  I innocently 
+answered that I knew nothing so entrancing as long mornings passed 
+at the Louvre.
+
+"Oh, yes, I do that too," she replied, "but I like the 'Bon Marche' 
+best!"
+
+A trip abroad has become a purely social function to a large number 
+of wealthy Americans, including "presentation" in London and a 
+winter in Rome or Cairo.  And just as a "smart" Englishman is sure 
+to tell you that he has never visited the "Tower," it has become 
+good form to ignore the sight-seeing side of Europe; hundreds of 
+New Yorkers never seeing anything of Paris beyond the Rue de la 
+Paix and the Bois.  They would as soon think of going to Cluny or 
+St. Denis as of visiting the museum in our park!
+
+Such people go to Fontainebleau because they are buying furniture, 
+and they wish to see the best models.  They go to Versailles on the 
+coach and "do" the Palace during the half-hour before luncheon.  
+Beyond that, enthusiasm rarely carries them.  As soon as they have 
+settled themselves at the Bristol or the Rhin begins the endless 
+treadmill of leaving cards on all the people just seen at home, and 
+whom they will meet again in a couple of months at Newport or Bar 
+Harbor.  This duty and the all-entrancing occupation of getting 
+clothes fills up every spare hour.  Indeed, clothes seem to pervade 
+the air of Paris in May, the conversation rarely deviating from 
+them.  If you meet a lady you know looking ill, and ask the cause, 
+it generally turns out to be "four hours a day standing to be 
+fitted."  Incredible as it may seem, I have been told of one plain 
+maiden lady, who makes a trip across, spring and autumn, with the 
+sole object of getting her two yearly outfits.
+
+Remembering the hundreds of cultivated people whose dream in life 
+(often unrealized from lack of means) has been to go abroad and 
+visit the scenes their reading has made familiar, and knowing what 
+such a trip would mean to them, and how it would be looked back 
+upon during the rest of an obscure life, I felt it almost a duty to 
+"suppress" a wealthy female (doubtless an American cousin of Lady 
+Midas) when she informed me, the other day, that decidedly she 
+would not go abroad this spring.
+
+"It is not necessary.  Worth has my measures!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 4 - The Outer and the Inner Woman
+
+
+IT is a sad commentary on our boasted civilization that cases of 
+shoplifting occur more and more frequently each year, in which the 
+delinquents are women of education and refinement, or at least 
+belong to families and occupy positions in which one would expect 
+to find those qualities!  The reason, however, is not difficult to 
+discover.
+
+In the wake of our hasty and immature prosperity has come (as it 
+does to all suddenly enriched societies) a love of ostentation, a 
+desire to dazzle the crowd by displays of luxury and rich trappings 
+indicative of crude and vulgar standards.  The newly acquired 
+money, instead of being expended for solid comforts or articles 
+which would afford lasting satisfaction, is lavished on what can be 
+worn in public, or the outer shell of display, while the home table 
+and fireside belongings are neglected.  A glance around our 
+theatres, or at the men and women in our crowded thoroughfares, is 
+sufficient to reveal to even a casual observer that the mania for 
+fine clothes and what is costly, PER SE, has become the besetting 
+sin of our day and our land.
+
+The tone of most of the papers and of our theatrical advertisements 
+reflects this feeling.  The amount of money expended for a work of 
+art or a new building is mentioned before any comment as to its 
+beauty or fitness.  A play is spoken of as "Manager So and So's 
+thirty-thousand-dollar production!"  The fact that a favorite 
+actress will appear in four different dresses during the three acts 
+of a comedy, each toilet being a special creation designed for her 
+by a leading Parisian house, is considered of supreme importance 
+and is dwelt upon in the programme as a special attraction.
+
+It would be astonishing if the taste of our women were different, 
+considering the way clothes are eternally being dangled before 
+their eyes.  Leading papers publish illustrated supplements devoted 
+exclusively to the subject of attire, thus carrying temptation into 
+every humble home, and suggesting unattainable luxuries.  Windows 
+in many of the larger shops contain life-sized manikins loaded with 
+the latest costly and ephemeral caprices of fashion arranged to 
+catch the eye of the poorer class of women, who stand in hundreds 
+gazing at the display like larks attracted by a mirror!  Watch 
+those women as they turn away, and listen to their sighs of 
+discontent and envy.  Do they not tell volumes about petty hopes 
+and ambitions?
+
+I do not refer to the wealthy women whose toilets are in keeping 
+with their incomes and the general footing of their households; 
+that they should spend more or less in fitting themselves out 
+daintily is of little importance.  The point where this subject 
+becomes painful is in families of small means where young girls 
+imagine that to be elaborately dressed is the first essential of 
+existence, and, in consequence, bend their labors and their 
+intelligence towards this end.  Last spring I asked an old friend 
+where she and her daughters intended passing their summer.  Her 
+answer struck me as being characteristic enough to quote: "We 
+should much prefer," she said, "returning to Bar Harbor, for we all 
+enjoy that place and have many friends there.  But the truth is, my 
+daughters have bought themselves very little in the way of toilet 
+this year, as our finances are not in a flourishing condition.  So 
+my poor girls will be obliged to make their last year's dresses do 
+for another season.  Under these circumstances, it is out of the 
+question for us to return a second summer to the same place."
+
+I do not know how this anecdote strikes my readers.  It made me 
+thoughtful and sad to think that, in a family of intelligent and 
+practical women, such a reason should be considered sufficient to 
+outweigh enjoyment, social relations, even health, and allowed to 
+change the plans of an entire family.
+
+As American women are so fond of copying English ways they should 
+be willing to take a few lessons on the subject of raiment from 
+across the water.  As this is not intended to be a dissertation on 
+"How to Dress Well on Nothing a Year," and as I feel the greatest 
+diffidence in approaching a subject of which I know absolutely 
+nothing, it will be better to sheer off from these reefs and 
+quicksands.  Every one who reads these lines will know perfectly 
+well what is meant, when reference is made to the good sense and 
+practical utility of English women's dress.
+
+What disgusts and angers me (when my way takes me into our surface 
+or elevated cars or into ferry boats and local trains) is the utter 
+dissonance between the outfit of most of the women I meet and their 
+position and occupation.  So universal is this, that it might 
+almost be laid down as an axiom, that the American woman, no matter 
+in what walk of life you observe her, or what the time or the 
+place, is always persistently and grotesquely overdressed.  From 
+the women who frequent the hotels of our summer or winter resorts, 
+down all the steps of the social staircase to the char-woman, who 
+consents (spasmodically) to remove the dust and waste-papers from 
+my office, there seems to be the same complete disregard of 
+fitness.  The other evening, in leaving my rooms, I brushed against 
+a portly person in the half-light of the corridor.  There was a 
+shimmer of (what appeared to my inexperienced eyes as) costly 
+stuffs, a huge hat crowned the shadow itself, "topped by nodding 
+plumes," which seemed to account for the depleted condition of my 
+feather duster.
+
+I found on inquiring of the janitor, that the dressy person I had 
+met, was the char-woman in street attire, and that a closet was set 
+aside in the building, for the special purpose of her morning and 
+evening transformations, which she underwent in the belief that her 
+social position in Avenue A would suffer, should she appear in the 
+streets wearing anything less costly than seal-skin and velvet or 
+such imitations of those expensive materials as her stipend would 
+permit.
+
+I have as tenants of a small wooden house in Jersey City, a bank 
+clerk, his wife and their three daughters.  He earns in the 
+neighborhood of fifteen hundred dollars a year.  Their rent (with 
+which, by the way, they are always in arrears) is three hundred 
+dollars.  I am favored spring and autumn by a visit from the ladies 
+of that family, in the hope (generally futile) of inducing me to do 
+some ornamental papering or painting in their residence, subjects 
+on which they have by experience found my agent to be 
+unapproachable.  When those four women descend upon me, I am fairly 
+dazzled by the splendor of their attire, and lost in wonder as to 
+how the price of all that finery can have been squeezed out of the 
+twelve remaining hundreds of their income.  When I meet the father 
+he is shabby to the outer limits of the genteel.  His hat has, I am 
+sure, supported the suns and snowstorms of a dozen seasons.  There 
+is a threadbare shine on his apparel that suggests a heartache in 
+each whitened seam, but the ladies are mirrors of fashion, as well 
+as moulds of form.  What can remain for any creature comforts after 
+all those fine clothes have been paid for?  And how much is put 
+away for the years when the long-suffering money maker will be past 
+work, or saved towards the time when sickness or accident shall 
+appear on the horizon?  How those ladies had the "nerve" to enter a 
+ferry boat or crowd into a cable car, dressed as they were, has 
+always been a marvel to me.  A landau and two liveried servants 
+would barely have been in keeping with their appearance.
+
+Not long ago, a great English nobleman, who is also famous in the 
+yachting world, visited this country accompanied by his two 
+daughters, high-bred and genial ladies.  No self-respecting 
+American shop girl or fashionable typewriter would have 
+condescended to appear in the inexpensive attire which those 
+English women wore.  Wherever one met them, at dinner, FETE, or 
+ball, they were always the most simply dressed women in the room.  
+I wonder if it ever occurred to any of their gorgeously attired 
+hostesses, that it was because their transatlantic guests were so 
+sure of their position, that they contented themselves with such 
+simple toilets knowing that nothing they might wear could either 
+improve or alter their standing
+
+In former ages, sumptuary laws were enacted by parental 
+governments, in the hope of suppressing extravagance in dress, the 
+state of affairs we deplore now, not being a new development of 
+human weakness, but as old as wealth.
+
+The desire to shine by the splendor of one's trappings is the first 
+idea of the parvenu, especially here in this country, where the 
+ambitious are denied the pleasure of acquiring a title, and where 
+official rank carries with it so little social weight.  Few more 
+striking ways present themselves to the crude and half-educated for 
+the expenditure of a new fortune than the purchase of sumptuous 
+apparel, the satisfaction being immediate and material.  The wearer 
+of a complete and perfect toilet must experience a delight of which 
+the uninitiated know nothing, for such cruel sacrifices are made 
+and so many privations endured to procure this satisfaction.  When 
+I see groups of women, clad in the latest designs of purple and 
+fine linen, stand shivering on street corners of a winter night, 
+until they can crowd into a car, I doubt if the joy they get from 
+their clothes, compensates them for the creature comforts they are 
+forced to forego, and I wonder if it never occurs to them to spend 
+less on their wardrobes and so feel they can afford to return from 
+a theatre or concert comfortably, in a cab, as a foreign woman, 
+with their income would do.
+
+There is a stoical determination about the American point of view 
+that compels a certain amount of respect.  Our countrywomen will 
+deny themselves pleasures, will economize on their food and will 
+remain in town during the summer, but when walking abroad they must 
+be clad in the best, so that no one may know by their appearance if 
+the income be counted by hundreds or thousands.
+
+While these standards prevail and the female mind is fixed on this 
+subject with such dire intent, it is not astonishing that a weaker 
+sister is occasionally tempted beyond her powers of resistance.  
+Nor that each day a new case of a well-dressed woman thieving in a 
+shop reaches our ears.  The poor feeble-minded creature is not to 
+blame.  She is but the reflexion of the minds around her and is 
+probably like the lady Emerson tells of, who confessed to him "that 
+the sense of being perfectly well-dressed had given her a feeling 
+of inward tranquillity which religion was powerless to bestow."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 5 - On Some Gilded Misalliances
+
+
+A DEAR old American lady, who lived the greater part of her life in 
+Rome, and received every body worth knowing in her spacious 
+drawing-rooms, far up in the dim vastnesses of a Roman palace, used 
+to say that she had only known one really happy marriage made by an 
+American girl abroad.
+
+In those days, being young and innocent, I considered that remark 
+cynical, and in my heart thought nothing could be more romantic and 
+charming than for a fair compatriot to assume an historic title and 
+retire to her husband's estates, and rule smilingly over him and a 
+devoted tenantry, as in the last act of a comic opera, when a rose-
+colored light is burning and the orchestra plays the last brilliant 
+chords of a wedding march.
+
+There seemed to my perverted sense a certain poetic justice about 
+the fact that money, gained honestly but prosaically, in groceries 
+or gas, should go to regild an ancient blazon or prop up the 
+crumbling walls of some stately palace abroad.
+
+Many thoughtful years and many cruel realities have taught me that 
+my gracious hostess of the "seventies" was right, and that marriage 
+under these conditions is apt to be much more like the comic opera 
+after the curtain has been rung down, when the lights are out, the 
+applauding public gone home, and the weary actors brought slowly 
+back to the present and the positive, are wondering how they are to 
+pay their rent or dodge the warrant in ambush around the corner.
+
+International marriages usually come about from a deficient 
+knowledge of the world.  The father becomes rich, the family travel 
+abroad, some mutual friend (often from purely interested motives) 
+produces a suitor for the hand of the daughter, in the shape of a 
+"prince" with a title that makes the whole simple American family 
+quiver with delight.
+
+After a few visits the suitor declares himself; the girl is 
+flattered, the father loses his head, seeing visions of his loved 
+daughter hob-nobbing with royalty, and (intoxicating thought!) 
+snubbing the "swells" at home who had shown reluctance to recognize 
+him and his family.
+
+It is next to impossible for him to get any reliable information 
+about his future son-in-law in a country where, as an American, he 
+has few social relations, belongs to no club, and whose idiom is a 
+sealed book to him.  Every circumstance conspires to keep the flaws 
+on the article for sale out of sight and place the suitor in an 
+advantageous light.  Several weeks' "courting" follows, 
+paterfamilias agrees to part with a handsome share of his earnings, 
+and a marriage is "arranged."
+
+In the case where the girl has retained some of her self-respect 
+the suitor is made to come to her country for the ceremony.  And, 
+that the contrast between European ways and our simple habits may 
+not be too striking, an establishment is hastily got together, with 
+hired liveries and new-bought carriages, as in a recent case in 
+this state.  The sensational papers write up this "international 
+union," and publish "faked" portraits of the bride and her noble 
+spouse.  The sovereign of the groom's country (enchanted that some 
+more American money is to be imported into his land) sends an 
+economical present and an autograph letter.  The act ends.  
+Limelight and slow music!
+
+In a few years rumors of dissent and trouble float vaguely back to 
+the girl's family.  Finally, either a great scandal occurs, and 
+there is one dishonored home the more in the world, or an 
+expatriated woman, thousands of miles from the friends and 
+relatives who might be of some comfort to her, makes up her mind to 
+accept "anything" for the sake of her children, and attempts to 
+build up some sort of an existence out of the remains of her lost 
+illusions, and the father wakes up from his dream to realize that 
+his wealth has only served to ruin what he loved best in all the 
+world.
+
+Sometimes the conditions are delightfully comic, as in a well-known 
+case, where the daughter, who married into an indolent, happy-go-
+lucky Italian family, had inherited her father's business push and 
+energy along with his fortune, and immediately set about "running" 
+her husband's estate as she had seen her father do his bank.  She 
+tried to revive a half-forgotten industry in the district, scraped 
+and whitewashed their picturesque old villa, proposed her husband's 
+entering business, and in short dashed head down against all his 
+inherited traditions and national prejudices, until her new family 
+loathed the sight of the brisk American face, and the poor she had 
+tried to help, sulked in their newly drained houses and refused to 
+be comforted.  Her ways were not Italian ways, and she seemed to 
+the nun-like Italian ladies, almost unsexed, as she tramped about 
+the fields, talking artificial manure and subsoil drainage with the 
+men.  Yet neither she nor her husband was to blame.  The young 
+Italian had but followed the teachings of his family, which decreed 
+that the only honorable way for an aristocrat to acquire wealth was 
+to marry it.  The American wife honestly tried to do her duty in 
+this new position, naively thinking she could engraft transatlantic 
+"go" upon the indolent Italian character.  Her work was in vain; 
+she made herself and her husband so unpopular that they are now 
+living in this country, regretting too late the error of their 
+ways.
+
+Another case but little less laughable, is that of a Boston girl 
+with a neat little fortune of her own, who, when married to the 
+young Viennese of her choice, found that he expected her to live 
+with his family on the third floor of their "palace" (the two lower 
+floors being rented to foreigners), and as there was hardly enough 
+money for a box at the opera, she was not expected to go, whereas 
+his position made it necessary for him to have a stall and appear 
+there nightly among the men of his rank, the astonished and 
+disillusioned Bostonian remaining at home EN TETE-A-TETE with the 
+women of his family, who seemed to think this the most natural 
+arrangement in the world.
+
+It certainly is astonishing that we, the most patriotic of nations, 
+with such high opinion of ourselves and our institutions, should be 
+so ready to hand over our daughters and our ducats to the first 
+foreigner who asks for them, often requiring less information about 
+him than we should consider necessary before buying a horse or a 
+dog.
+
+Women of no other nation have this mania for espousing aliens.  
+Nowhere else would a girl with a large fortune dream of marrying 
+out of her country.  Her highest ideal of a husband would be a man 
+of her own kin.  It is the rarest thing in the world to find a 
+well-born French, Spanish, or Italian woman married to a foreigner 
+and living away from her country.  How can a woman expect to be 
+happy separated from all the ties and traditions of her youth?  If 
+she is taken abroad young, she may still hope to replace her 
+friends as is often done.  But the real reason of unhappiness 
+(greater and deeper than this) lies in the fundamental difference 
+of the whole social structure between our country and that of her 
+adoption, and the radically different way of looking at every side 
+of life.
+
+Surely a girl must feel that a man who allows a marriage to be 
+arranged for him (and only signs the contact because its pecuniary 
+clauses are to his satisfaction, and who would withdraw in a moment 
+if these were suppressed), must have an entirely different point of 
+view from her own on all the vital issues of life.
+
+Foreigners undoubtedly make excellent husbands for their own women.  
+But they are, except in rare cases, unsatisfactory helpmeets for 
+American girls.  It is impossible to touch on more than a side or 
+two of this subject.  But as an illustration the following 
+contrasted stories may be cited:
+
+Two sisters of an aristocratic American family, each with an income 
+of over forty thousand dollars a year, recently married French 
+noblemen.  They naturally expected to continue abroad the life they 
+had led at home, in which opera boxes, saddle horses, and constant 
+entertaining were matters of course.  In both cases, our 
+compatriots discovered that their husbands (neither of them 
+penniless) had entirely different views.  In the first place, they 
+were told that it was considered "bad form" in France for young 
+married women to entertain; besides, the money was needed for 
+improvements, and in many other ways, and as every well-to-do 
+French family puts aside at least a third of its income as DOTS for 
+the children (boys as well as girls), these brides found themselves 
+cramped for money for the first time in their lives, and obliged, 
+during their one month a year in Paris, to put up with hired traps, 
+and depend on their friends for evenings at the opera.
+
+This story is a telling set-off to the case of an American wife, 
+who one day received a windfall in the form of a check for a tidy 
+amount.  She immediately proposed a trip abroad to her husband, but 
+found that he preferred to remain at home in the society of his 
+horses and dogs.  So our fair compatriot starts off (with his full 
+consent), has her outing, spends her little "pile," and returns 
+after three or four months to the home of her delighted spouse.
+
+Do these two stories need any comment?  Let our sisters and their 
+friends think twice before they make themselves irrevocably wheels 
+in a machine whose working is unknown to them, lest they be torn to 
+pieces as it moves.  Having the good luck to be born in the 
+"paradise of women," let them beware how they leave it, charm the 
+serpent never so wisely, for they may find themselves, like the 
+Peri, outside the gate.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 6 - The Complacency of Mediocrity
+
+
+FULL as small intellects are of queer kinks, unexplained turnings 
+and groundless likes and dislikes, the bland contentment that buoys 
+up the incompetent is the most difficult of all vagaries to account 
+for.  Rarely do twenty-four hours pass without examples of this 
+exasperating weakness appearing on the surface of those shallows 
+that commonplace people so naively call "their minds."
+
+What one would expect is extreme modesty, in the half-educated or 
+the ignorant, and self-approbation higher up in the scale, where it 
+might more reasonably dwell.  Experience, however, teaches that 
+exactly the opposite is the case among those who have achieved 
+success.
+
+The accidents of a life turned by chance out of the beaten tracks, 
+have thrown me at times into acquaintanceship with some of the 
+greater lights of the last thirty years.  And not only have they 
+been, as a rule, most unassuming men and women; but in the majority 
+of cases positively self-depreciatory; doubting of themselves and 
+their talents, constantly aiming at greater perfection in their art 
+or a higher development of their powers, never contented with what 
+they have achieved, beyond the idea that it has been another step 
+toward their goal.  Knowing this, it is always a shock on meeting 
+the mediocre people who form such a discouraging majority in any 
+society, to discover that they are all so pleased with themselves, 
+their achievements, their place in the world, and their own ability 
+and discernment!
+
+Who has not sat chafing in silence while Mediocrity, in a white 
+waistcoat and jangling fobs, occupied the after-dinner hour in 
+imparting second-hand information as his personal views on 
+literature and art?  Can you not hear him saying once again: "I 
+don't pretend to know anything about art and all that sort of 
+thing, you know, but when I go to an exhibition I can always pick 
+out the best pictures at a glance.  Sort of a way I have, and I 
+never make mistakes, you know."
+
+Then go and watch, as I have, Henri Rochefort as he laboriously 
+forms the opinions that are to appear later in one of his "SALONS," 
+realizing the while that he is FACILE PRINCEPS among the art 
+critics of his day, that with a line he can make or mar a 
+reputation and by a word draw the admiring crowd around an unknown 
+canvas.  While Rochefort toils and ponders and hesitates, do you 
+suppose a doubt as to his own astuteness ever dims the self-
+complacency of White Waistcoat?  Never!
+
+There lies the strength of the feeble-minded.  By a special 
+dispensation of Providence, they can never see but one side of a 
+subject, so are always convinced that they are right, and from the 
+height of their contentment, look down on those who chance to 
+differ with them.
+
+A lady who has gathered into her dainty salons the fruit of many 
+years' careful study and tireless "weeding" will ask anxiously if 
+you are quite sure you like the effect of her latest acquisition - 
+some eighteenth-century statuette or screen (flotsam, probably, 
+from the great shipwreck of Versailles), and listen earnestly to 
+your verdict.  The good soul who has just furnished her house by 
+contract, with the latest "Louis Fourteenth Street" productions, 
+conducts you complacently through her chambers of horrors, wreathed 
+in tranquil smiles, born of ignorance and that smug assurance 
+granted only to the - small.
+
+When a small intellect goes in for cultivating itself and improving 
+its mind, you realize what the poet meant in asserting that a 
+little learning was a dangerous thing.  For Mediocrity is apt, when 
+it dines out, to get up a subject beforehand, and announce to an 
+astonished circle, as quite new and personal discoveries, that the 
+Renaissance was introduced into France from Italy, or that Columbus 
+in his day made important "finds."
+
+When the incompetent advance another step and write or paint - 
+which, alas! is only too frequent - the world of art and literature 
+is flooded with their productions.  When White Waistcoat, for 
+example, takes to painting, late in life, and comes to you, canvas 
+in hand, for criticism (read praise), he is apt to remark modestly:
+
+"Corot never painted until he was fifty, and I am only forty-eight.  
+So I feel I should not let myself be discouraged."
+
+The problem of life is said to be the finding of a happiness that 
+is not enjoyed at the expense of others, and surely this class have 
+solved that Sphinx's riddle, for they float through their days in a 
+dream of complacency disturbed neither by corroding doubt nor 
+harassed by jealousies.
+
+Whole families of feeble-minded people, on the strength of an 
+ancestor who achieved distinction a hundred years ago, live in 
+constant thanksgiving that they "are not as other men."  None of 
+the great man's descendants have done anything to be particularly 
+proud of since their remote progenitor signed the Declaration of 
+Independence or governed a colony.  They have vegetated in small 
+provincial cities and inter-married into other equally fortunate 
+families, but the sense of superiority is ever present to sustain 
+them, under straitened circumstances and diminishing prestige.  The 
+world may move on around them, but they never advance.  Why should 
+they?  They have reached perfection.  The brains and enterprise 
+that have revolutionized our age knock in vain at their doors.  
+They belong to that vast "majority that is always in the wrong," 
+being so pleased with themselves, their ways, and their feeble 
+little lines of thought, that any change or advancement gives their 
+system a shock.
+
+A painter I know was once importuned for a sketch by a lady of this 
+class.  After many delays and renewed demands he presented her one 
+day, when she and some friends were visiting his studio, with a 
+delightful open-air study simply framed.  She seemed confused at 
+the offering, to his astonishment, as she had not lacked APLOMB in 
+asking for the sketch.  After much blushing and fumbling she 
+succeeded in getting the painting loose, and handing back the 
+frame, remarked:
+
+"I will take the painting, but you must keep the frame.  My husband 
+would never allow me to accept anything of value from you!" - and 
+smiled on the speechless painter, doubtless charmed with her own 
+tact.
+
+Complacent people are the same drag on a society that a brake would 
+be to a coach going up hill.  They are the "eternal negative" and 
+would extinguish, if they could, any light stronger than that to 
+which their weak eyes have been accustomed.  They look with 
+astonishment and distrust at any one trying to break away from 
+their tiresome old ways and habits, and wonder why all the world is 
+not as pleased with their personalities as they are themselves, 
+suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time listening to 
+their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any 
+innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if 
+things are altered.  No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant 
+than the "complacent" are to the world.  They resent any progress 
+and are offended if you mention before them any new standards or 
+points of view.  "What has been good enough for us and our parents 
+should certainly be satisfactory to the younger generations."  It 
+seems to the contented like pure presumption on the part of their 
+acquaintances to wander after strange gods, in the shape of new 
+ideals, higher standards of culture, or a perfected refinement of 
+surroundings.
+
+We are perhaps wrong to pity complacent people.  It is for another 
+class our sympathy should be kept; for those who cannot refrain 
+from doubting of themselves and the value of their work - those 
+unfortunate gifted and artistic spirits who descend too often the 
+VIA DOLOROSA of discontent and despair, who have a higher ideal 
+than their neighbors, and, in struggling after an unattainable 
+perfection, fall by the wayside.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 7 - The Discontent of Talent
+
+
+THE complacency that buoys up self-sufficient souls, soothing them 
+with the illusion that they themselves, their towns, country, 
+language, and habits are above improvement, causing them to 
+shudder, as at a sacrilege, if any changes are suggested, is 
+fortunately limited to a class of stay-at-home nonentities.  In 
+proportion as it is common among them, is it rare or delightfully 
+absent in any society of gifted or imaginative people.
+
+Among our globe-trotting compatriots this defect is much less 
+general than in the older nations of the world, for the excellent 
+reason, that the moment a man travels or takes the trouble to know 
+people of different nationalities, his armor of complacency 
+receives so severe a blow, that it is shattered forever, the 
+wanderer returning home wiser and much more modest.  There seems to 
+be something fatal to conceit in the air of great centres; 
+professionally or in general society a man so soon finds his level.
+
+The "great world" may foster other faults; human nature is sure to 
+develop some in every walk of life.  Smug contentment, however, 
+disappears in its rarefied atmosphere, giving place to a craving 
+for improvement, a nervous alertness that keeps the mind from 
+stagnating and urges it on to do its best.
+
+It is never the beautiful woman who sits down in smiling serenity 
+before her mirror.  She is tireless in her efforts to enhance her 
+beauty and set it off to the best advantage.  Her figure is never 
+slender enough, nor her carriage sufficiently erect to satisfy.  
+But the "frump" will let herself and all her surroundings go to 
+seed, not from humbleness of mind or an overwhelming sense of her 
+own unworthiness, but in pure complacent conceit.
+
+A criticism to which the highly gifted lay themselves open from 
+those who do not understand them, is their love of praise, the 
+critics failing to grasp the fact that this passion for measuring 
+one's self with others, like the gad-fly pursuing poor Io, never 
+allows a moment's repose in the green pastures of success, but 
+goads them constantly up the rocky sides of endeavor.  It is not 
+that they love flattery, but that they need approbation as a 
+counterpoise to the dark moments of self-abasement and as a 
+sustaining aid for higher flights.
+
+Many years ago I was present at a final sitting which my master, 
+Carolus Duran, gave to one of my fair compatriots.  He knew that 
+the lady was leaving Paris on the morrow, and that in an hour, her 
+husband and his friends were coming to see and criticise the 
+portrait - always a terrible ordeal for an artist.
+
+To any one familiar with this painter's moods, it was evident that 
+the result of the sitting was not entirely satisfactory.  The quick 
+breathing, the impatient tapping movement of the foot, the swift 
+backward springs to obtain a better view, so characteristic of him 
+in moments of doubt, and which had twenty years before earned him 
+the name of LE DANSEUR from his fellow-copyists at the Louvre, 
+betrayed to even a casual observer that his discouragement and 
+discontent were at boiling point.
+
+The sound of a bell and a murmur of voices announced the entrance 
+of the visitors into the vast studio.  After the formalities of 
+introduction had been accomplished the new-comers glanced at the 
+portrait, but uttered never a word.  From it they passed in a 
+perfectly casual manner to an inspection of the beautiful contents 
+of the room, investigating the tapestries, admiring the armor, and 
+finally, after another glance at the portrait, the husband 
+remarked: "You have given my wife a jolly long neck, haven't you?" 
+and, turning to his friends, began laughing and chatting in 
+English.
+
+If vitriol had been thrown on my poor master's quivering frame, the 
+effect could not have been more instantaneous, his ignorance of the 
+language spoken doubtless exaggerating his impression of being 
+ridiculed.  Suddenly he turned very white, and before any of us had 
+divined his intention he had seized a Japanese sword lying by and 
+cut a dozen gashes across the canvas.  Then, dropping his weapon, 
+he flung out of the room, leaving his sitter and her friends in 
+speechless consternation, to wonder then and ever after in what way 
+they had offended him.  In their opinions, if a man had talent and 
+understood his business, he should produce portraits with the same 
+ease that he would answer dinner invitations, and if they paid for, 
+they were in no way bound also to praise, his work.  They were 
+entirely pleased with the result, but did not consider it necessary 
+to tell him so, no idea having crossed their minds that he might be 
+in one of those moods so frequent with artistic natures, when words 
+of approbation and praise are as necessary to them, as the air we 
+breathe is to us, mortals of a commoner clay.
+
+Even in the theatrical and operatic professions, those hotbeds of 
+conceit, you will generally find among the "stars" abysmal depths 
+of discouragement and despair.  One great tenor, who has delighted 
+New York audiences during several winters past, invariably 
+announces to his intimates on arising that his "voice has gone," 
+and that, in consequence he will "never sing again," and has to be 
+caressed and cajoled back into some semblance of confidence before 
+attempting a performance.  This same artist, with an almost 
+limitless repertoire and a reputation no new successes could 
+enhance, recently risked all to sing what he considered a higher 
+class of music, infinitely more fatiguing to his voice, because he 
+was impelled onward by the ideal that forces genius to constant 
+improvement and development of its powers.
+
+What the people who meet these artists occasionally at a private 
+concert or behind the scenes during the intense strain of a 
+representation, take too readily for monumental egoism and conceit, 
+is, the greater part of the time, merely the desire for a 
+sustaining word, a longing for the stimulant of praise.
+
+All actors and singers are but big children, and must be humored 
+and petted like children when you wish them to do their best.  It 
+is necessary for them to feel in touch with their audiences; to be 
+assured that they are not falling below the high ideals formed for 
+their work.
+
+Some winters ago a performance at the opera nearly came to a 
+standstill because an all-conquering soprano was found crying in 
+her dressing-room.  After many weary moments of consolation and 
+questioning, it came out that she felt quite sure she no longer had 
+any talent.  One of the other singers had laughed at her voice, and 
+in consequence there was nothing left to live for.  A half-hour 
+later, owing to judicious "treatment," she was singing gloriously 
+and bowing her thanks to thunders of applause.
+
+Rather than blame this divine discontent that has made man what he 
+is to-day, let us glorify and envy it, pitying the while the frail 
+mortal vessels it consumes with its flame.  No adulation can turn 
+such natures from their goal, and in the hour of triumph the slave 
+is always at their side to whisper the word of warning.  This 
+discontent is the leaven that has raised the whole loaf of dull 
+humanity to better things and higher efforts, those privileged to 
+feel it are the suns that illuminate our system.  If on these 
+luminaries observers have discovered spots, it is well to remember 
+that these blemishes are but the defects of their qualities, and 
+better far than the total eclipse that shrouds so large a part of 
+humanity in colorless complacency.
+
+It will never be known how many master-pieces have been lost to the 
+world because at the critical moment a friend has not been at hand 
+with the stimulant of sympathy and encouragement needed by an 
+overworked, straining artist who was beginning to lose confidence 
+in himself; to soothe his irritated nerves with the balm of praise, 
+and take his poor aching head on a friendly shoulder and let him 
+sob out there all his doubt and discouragement.
+
+So let us not be niggardly or ungenerous in meting out to 
+struggling fellow-beings their share, and perchance a little more 
+than their share of approbation and applause, poor enough return, 
+after all, for the pleasure their labors have procured us.  What 
+adequate compensation can we mete out to an author for the hours of 
+delight and self-forgetfulness his talent has brought to us in 
+moments of loneliness, illness, or grief?  What can pay our debt to 
+a painter who has fixed on canvas the face we love?
+
+The little return that it is in our power to make for all the joy 
+these gifted fellow-beings bring into our lives is (closing our 
+eyes to minor imperfections) to warmly applaud them as they move 
+upward, along their stony path.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 8 - Slouch
+
+
+I SHOULD like to see, in every school-room of our growing country, 
+in every business office, at the railway stations, and on street 
+corners, large placards placed with "Do not slouch" printed thereon 
+in distinct and imposing characters.  If ever there was a tendency 
+that needed nipping in the bud (I fear the bud is fast becoming a 
+full-blown flower), it is this discouraging national failing.
+
+Each year when I return from my spring wanderings, among the 
+benighted and effete nations of the Old World, on whom the 
+untravelled American looks down from the height of his superiority, 
+I am struck anew by the contrast between the trim, well-groomed 
+officials left behind on one side of the ocean and the happy-go-
+lucky, slouching individuals I find on the other.
+
+As I ride up town this unpleasant impression deepens.  In the 
+"little Mother Isle" I have just left, bus-drivers have quite a 
+coaching air, with hat and coat of knowing form.  They sport 
+flowers in their button-holes and salute other bus-drivers, when 
+they meet, with a twist of whip and elbow refreshingly correct, 
+showing that they take pride in their calling, and have been at 
+some pains to turn themselves out as smart in appearance as 
+finances would allow.
+
+Here, on the contrary, the stage and cab drivers I meet seem to be 
+under a blight, and to have lost all interest in life.  They lounge 
+on the box, their legs straggling aimlessly, one hand holding the 
+reins, the other hanging dejectedly by the side.  Yet there is 
+little doubt that these heartbroken citizens are earning double 
+what their London CONFRERES gain.  The shadow of the national 
+peculiarity is over them.
+
+When I get to my rooms, the elevator boy is reclining in the lift, 
+and hardly raises his eye-lids as he languidly manoeuvres the rope.  
+I have seen that boy now for months, but never when his boots and 
+clothes were brushed or when his cravat was not riding proudly 
+above his collar.  On occasions I have offered him pins, which he 
+took wearily, doubtless because it was less trouble than to refuse.  
+The next day, however, his cravat again rode triumphant, mocking my 
+efforts to keep it in its place.  His hair, too, has been a cause 
+of wonder to me.  How does he manage to have it always so long and 
+so unkempt?  More than once, when expecting callers, I have bribed 
+him to have it cut, but it seemed to grow in the night, back to its 
+poetic profusion.
+
+In what does this noble disregard for appearances which 
+characterizes American men originate?  Our climate, as some 
+suggest, or discouragement at not all being millionaires?  It more 
+likely comes from an absence with us of the military training that 
+abroad goes so far toward licking young men into shape.
+
+I shall never forget the surprise on the face of a French statesman 
+to whom I once expressed my sympathy for his country, laboring 
+under the burden of so vast a standing army.  He answered:
+
+"The financial burden is doubtless great; but you have others.  
+Witness your pension expenditures.  With us the money drawn from 
+the people is used in such a way as to be of inestimable value to 
+them.  We take the young hobbledehoy farm-hand or mechanic, 
+ignorant, mannerless, uncleanly as he may be, and turn him out at 
+the end of three years with his regiment, self-respecting and well-
+mannered, with habits of cleanliness and obedience, having acquired 
+a bearing, and a love of order that will cling to and serve him all 
+his life.  We do not go so far," he added, "as our English 
+neighbors in drilling men into superb manikins of 'form' and 
+carriage.  Our authorities do not consider it necessary.  But we 
+reclaim youths from the slovenliness of their native village or 
+workshop and make them tidy and mannerly citizens."
+
+These remarks came to mind the other day as I watched a group of 
+New England youths lounging on the steps of the village store, or 
+sitting in rows on a neighboring fence, until I longed to try if 
+even a judicial arrangement of tacks, 'business-end up,' on these 
+favorite seats would infuse any energy into their movements.  I 
+came to the conclusion that my French acquaintance was right, for 
+the only trim-looking men to be seen, were either veterans of our 
+war or youths belonging to the local militia.  And nowhere does one 
+see finer specimens of humanity than West Point and Annapolis turn 
+out.
+
+If any one doubts what kind of men slouching youths develop into, 
+let him look when he travels, at the dejected appearance of the 
+farmhouses throughout our land.  Surely our rural populations are 
+not so much poorer than those of other countries.  Yet when one 
+compares the dreary homes of even our well-to-do farmers with the 
+smiling, well-kept hamlets seen in England or on the Continent, 
+such would seem to be the case.
+
+If ours were an old and bankrupt nation, this air of discouragement 
+and decay could not be greater.  Outside of the big cities one 
+looks in vain for some sign of American dash and enterprise in the 
+appearance of our men and their homes.
+
+During a journey of over four thousand miles, made last spring as 
+the guest of a gentleman who knows our country thoroughly, I was 
+impressed most painfully with this abject air.  Never in all those 
+days did we see a fruit-tree trained on some sunny southern wall, a 
+smiling flower-garden or carefully clipped hedge.  My host told me 
+that hardly the necessary vegetables are grown, the inhabitants of 
+the West and South preferring canned food.  It is less trouble!
+
+If you wish to form an idea of the extent to which slouch prevails 
+in our country, try to start a "village improvement society," and 
+experience, as others have done, the apathy and ill-will of the 
+inhabitants when you go about among them and strive to summon some 
+of their local pride to your aid.
+
+In the town near which I pass my summers, a large stone, fallen 
+from a passing dray, lay for days in the middle of the principal 
+street, until I paid some boys to remove it.  No one cared, and the 
+dull-eyed inhabitants would doubtless be looking at it still but 
+for my impatience.
+
+One would imagine the villagers were all on the point of moving 
+away (and they generally are, if they can sell their land), so 
+little interest do they show in your plans.  Like all people who 
+have fallen into bad habits, they have grown to love their 
+slatternly ways and cling to them, resenting furiously any attempt 
+to shake them up to energy and reform.
+
+The farmer has not, however, a monopoly.  Slouch seems ubiquitous.  
+Our railway and steam-boat systems have tried in vain to combat it, 
+and supplied their employees with a livery (I beg the free and 
+independent voter's pardon, a uniform!), with but little effect.  
+The inherent tendency is too strong for the corporations.  The 
+conductors still shuffle along in their spotted garments, the cap 
+on the back of the head, and their legs anywhere, while they chew 
+gum in defiance of the whole Board of Directors.
+
+Go down to Washington, after a visit to the Houses of Parliament or 
+the Chamber of Deputies, and observe the contrast between the 
+bearing of our Senators and Representatives and the air of their 
+CONFRERES abroad.  Our law-makers seem trying to avoid every 
+appearance of "smartness."  Indeed, I am told, so great is the 
+prejudice in the United States against a well-turned-out man that a 
+candidate would seriously compromise his chances of election who 
+appeared before his constituents in other than the accustomed 
+shabby frock-coat, unbuttoned and floating, a pot hat, no gloves, 
+as much doubtfully white shirt-front as possible, and a wisp of 
+black silk for a tie; and if he can exhibit also a chin-whisker, 
+his chances of election are materially increased.
+
+Nothing offends an eye accustomed to our native LAISSER ALLER so 
+much as a well-brushed hat and shining boots.  When abroad, it is 
+easy to spot a compatriot as soon and as far as you can see one, by 
+his graceless gait, a cross between a lounge and a shuffle.  In 
+reading-, or dining-room, he is the only man whose spine does not 
+seem equal to its work, so he flops and straggles until, for the 
+honor of your land, you long to shake him and set him squarely on 
+his legs.
+
+No amount of reasoning can convince me that outward slovenliness is 
+not a sign of inward and moral supineness.  A neglected exterior 
+generally means a lax moral code.  The man who considers it too 
+much trouble to sit erect can hardly have given much time to his 
+tub or his toilet.  Having neglected his clothes, he will neglect 
+his manners, and between morals and manners we know the tie is 
+intimate.
+
+In the Orient a new reign is often inaugurated by the construction 
+of a mosque.  Vast expense is incurred to make it as splendid as 
+possible.  But, once completed, it is never touched again.  Others 
+are built by succeeding sovereigns, but neither thought nor 
+treasure is ever expended on the old ones.  When they can no longer 
+be used, they are abandoned, and fall into decay.  The same system 
+seems to prevail among our private owners and corporations.  
+Streets are paved, lamp-posts erected, store-fronts carefully 
+adorned, but from the hour the workman puts his finishing touch 
+upon them they are abandoned to the hand of fate.  The mud may cake 
+up knee-deep, wind and weather work their own sweet will, it is no 
+one's business to interfere.
+
+When abroad one of my amusements has been of an early morning to 
+watch Paris making its toilet.  The streets are taking a bath, 
+liveried attendants are blacking the boots of the lamp-posts and 
+newspaper-KIOSQUES, the shop-fronts are being shaved and having 
+their hair curled, cafe's and restaurants are putting on clean 
+shirts and tying their cravats smartly before their many mirrors.  
+By the time the world is up and about, the whole city, smiling 
+freshly from its matutinal tub, is ready to greet it gayly.
+
+It is this attention to detail that gives to Continental cities 
+their air of cheerfulness and thrift, and the utter lack of it that 
+impresses foreigners so painfully on arriving at our shores.
+
+It has been the fashion to laugh at the dude and his high collar, 
+at the darky in his master's cast-off clothes, aping style and 
+fashion.  Better the dude, better the colored dandy, better even 
+the Bowery "tough" with his affected carriage, for they at least 
+are reaching blindly out after something better than their 
+surroundings, striving after an ideal, and are in just so much the 
+superiors of the foolish souls who mock them - better, even 
+misguided efforts, than the ignoble stagnant quagmire of slouch 
+into which we seem to be slowly descending.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 9 - Social Suggestion
+
+
+THE question of how far we are unconsciously influenced by people 
+and surroundings, in our likes and dislikes, our opinions, and even 
+in our pleasures and intimate tastes, is a delicate and interesting 
+one, for the line between success and failure in the world, as on 
+the stage or in most of the professions, is so narrow and depends 
+so often on what humor one's "public" happen to be in at a 
+particular moment, that the subject is worthy of consideration.
+
+Has it never happened to you, for instance, to dine with friends 
+and go afterwards in a jolly humor to the play which proved so 
+delightful that you insist on taking your family immediately to see 
+it; when to your astonishment you discover that it is neither 
+clever nor amusing, on the contrary rather dull.  Your family look 
+at you in amazement and wonder what you had seen to admire in such 
+an asinine performance.  There was a case of suggestion!  You had 
+been influenced by your friends and had shared their opinions.  The 
+same thing occurs on a higher scale when one is raised out of one's 
+self by association with gifted and original people, a communion 
+with more cultivated natures which causes you to discover and 
+appreciate a thousand hidden beauties in literature, art or music 
+that left to yourself, you would have failed to notice.  Under 
+these circumstances you will often be astonished at the point and 
+piquancy of your own conversation.  This is but too true of a 
+number of subjects.
+
+We fondly believe our opinions and convictions to be original, and 
+with innocent conceit, imagine that we have formed them for 
+ourselves.  The illusion of being unlike other people is a common 
+vanity.  Beware of the man who asserts such a claim.  He is sure to 
+be a bore and will serve up to you, as his own, a muddle of ideas 
+and opinions which he has absorbed like a sponge from his 
+surroundings.
+
+No place is more propitious for studying this curious phenomenon, 
+than behind the scenes of a theatre, the last few nights before a 
+first performance.  The whole company is keyed up to a point of 
+mutual admiration that they are far from feeling generally.  "The 
+piece is charming and sure to be a success."  The author and the 
+interpreters of his thoughts are in complete communion.  The first 
+night comes.  The piece is a failure!  Drop into the greenroom then 
+and you will find an astonishing change has taken place.  The Star 
+will take you into a corner and assert that, she "always knew the 
+thing could not go, it was too imbecile, with such a company, it 
+was folly to expect anything else."  The author will abuse the Star 
+and the management.  The whole troupe is frankly disconcerted, like 
+people aroused out of a hypnotic sleep, wondering what they had 
+seen in the play to admire.
+
+In the social world we are even more inconsistent, accepting with 
+tameness the most astonishing theories and opinions.  Whole circles 
+will go on assuring each other how clever Miss So-and-So is, or, 
+how beautiful they think someone else.  Not because these good 
+people are any cleverer, or more attractive than their neighbors, 
+but simply because it is in the air to have these opinions about 
+them.  To such an extent does this hold good, that certain persons 
+are privileged to be vulgar and rude, to say impertinent things and 
+make remarks that would ostracize a less fortunate individual from 
+the polite world for ever; society will only smilingly shrug its 
+shoulders and say: "It is only Mr. So-and-So's way."  It is useless 
+to assert that in cases like these, people are in possession of 
+their normal senses.  They are under influences of which they are 
+perfectly unconscious.
+
+Have you ever seen a piece guyed?  Few sadder sights exist, the 
+human being rarely getting nearer the brute than when engaged in 
+this amusement.  Nothing the actor or actress can do will satisfy 
+the public.  Men who under ordinary circumstances would be 
+incapable of insulting a woman, will whistle and stamp and laugh, 
+at an unfortunate girl who is doing her utmost to amuse them.  A 
+terrible example of this was given two winters ago at one of our 
+concert halls, when a family of Western singers were subjected to 
+absolute ill-treatment at the hands of the public.  The young girls 
+were perfectly sincere, in their rude way, but this did not prevent 
+men from offering them every insult malice could devise, and making 
+them a target for every missile at hand.  So little does the public 
+think for itself in cases like this, that at the opening of the 
+performance had some well-known person given the signal for 
+applause, the whole audience would, in all probability, have been 
+delighted and made the wretched sisters a success.
+
+In my youth it was the fashion to affect admiration for the Italian 
+school of painting and especially for the great masters of the 
+Renaissance.  Whole families of perfectly inartistic English and 
+Americans might then he heard conscientiously admiring the ceiling 
+of the Sistine Chapel or Leonardo's Last Supper (Botticelli had not 
+been invented then) in the choicest guide-book language.
+
+When one considers the infinite knowledge of technique required to 
+understand the difficulties overcome by the giants of the 
+Renaissance and to appreciate the intrinsic qualities of their 
+creations, one asks one's self in wonder what our parents admired 
+in those paintings, and what tempted them to bring home and adorn 
+their houses with such dreadful copies of their favorites.  For if 
+they appreciated the originals they never would have bought the 
+copies, and if the copies pleased them, they must have been 
+incapable of enjoying the originals.  Yet all these people thought 
+themselves perfectly sincere.  To-day you will see the same thing 
+going on before the paintings of Claude Monet and Besnard, the same 
+admiration expressed by people who, you feel perfectly sure, do not 
+realize why these works of art are superior and can no more explain 
+to you why they think as they do than the sheep that follow each 
+other through a hole in a wall, can give a reason for their 
+actions.
+
+Dress and fashion in clothes are subjects above all others, where 
+the ineptitude of the human mind is most evident.  Can it be 
+explained in any other way, why the fashions of yesterday always 
+appear so hideous to us, - almost grotesque?  Take up an old album 
+of photographs and glance over the faded contents.  Was there ever 
+anything so absurd?  Look at the top hats men wore, and at the 
+skirts of the women!
+
+The mother of a family said to me the other day: "When I recall the 
+way in which girls were dressed in my youth, I wonder how any of us 
+ever got a husband."
+
+Study a photograph of the Empress Eugenie, that supreme arbiter of 
+elegance and grace.  Oh! those bunchy hooped skirts!  That awful 
+India shawl pinned off the shoulders, and the bonnet perched on a 
+roll of hair in the nape of the neck!  What were people thinking of 
+at that time?  Were they lunatics to deform in this way the 
+beautiful lines of the human body which it should be the first 
+object of toilet to enhance, or were they only lacking in the 
+artistic sense?  Nothing of the kind.  And what is more, they were 
+convinced that the real secret of beauty in dress had been 
+discovered by them; that past fashions were absurd, and that the 
+future could not improve on their creations.  The sculptors and 
+painters of that day (men of as great talent as any now living), 
+were enthusiastic in reproducing those monstrosities in marble or 
+on canvas, and authors raved about the ideal grace with which a 
+certain beauty draped her shawl.
+
+Another marked manner in which we are influenced by circumambient 
+suggestion, is in the transient furore certain games and pastimes 
+create.  We see intelligent people so given over to this influence 
+as barely to allow themselves time to eat and sleep, begrudging the 
+hours thus stolen from their favorite amusement.
+
+Ten years ago, tennis occupied every moment of our young people's 
+time; now golf has transplanted tennis in public favor, which does 
+not prove, however, that the latter is the better game, but simply 
+that compelled by the accumulated force of other people's opinions, 
+youths and maidens, old duffers and mature spinsters are willing to 
+pass many hours daily in all kinds of weather, solemnly following 
+an indian-rubber ball across ten-acre lots.
+
+If you suggest to people who are laboring under the illusion they 
+are amusing themselves that the game, absorbing so much of their 
+attention, is not as exciting as tennis nor as clever in 
+combinations as croquet, that in fact it would be quite as amusing 
+to roll an empty barrel several times around a plowed field, they 
+laugh at you in derision and instantly put you down in their 
+profound minds as a man who does not understand "sport."
+
+Yet these very people were tennis-mad twenty years ago and had 
+night come to interrupt a game of croquet would have ordered 
+lanterns lighted in order to finish the match so enthralling were 
+its intricacies.
+
+Everybody has known how to play BEZIQUE in this country for years, 
+yet within the last eighteen months, whole circles of our friends 
+have been seized with a midsummer madness and willingly sat glued 
+to a card-table through long hot afternoons and again after dinner 
+until day dawned on their folly.
+
+Certain MEMOIRES of Louis Fifteenth's reign tell of an 
+"unravelling" mania that developed at his court.  It began by some 
+people fraying out old silks to obtain the gold and silver threads 
+from worn-out stuffs; this occupation soon became the rage, nothing 
+could restrain the delirium of destruction, great ladies tore 
+priceless tapestries from their walls and brocades from their 
+furniture, in order to unravel those materials and as the old stock 
+did not suffice for the demand thousands were spent on new brocades 
+and velvets, which were instantly destroyed, entertainments were 
+given where unravelling was the only amusement offered, the entire 
+court thinking and talking of nothing else for months.
+
+What is the logical deduction to be drawn from all this?  Simply 
+that people do not see with their eyes or judge with their 
+understandings; that an all-pervading hypnotism, an ambient 
+suggestion, at times envelops us taking from people all free will, 
+and replacing it with the taste and judgment of the moment.
+
+The number of people is small in each generation, who are strong 
+enough to rise above their surroundings and think for themselves.  
+The rest are as dry leaves on a stream.  They float along and turn 
+gayly in the eddies, convinced all the time (as perhaps are the 
+leaves) that they act entirely from their own volition and that 
+their movements are having a profound influence on the direction 
+and force of the current.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 10 - Bohemia
+
+
+LUNCHING with a talented English comedian and his wife the other 
+day, the conversation turned on Bohemia, the evasive no-man's-land 
+that Thackeray referred to, in so many of his books, and to which 
+he looked back lovingly in his later years, when, as he said, he 
+had forgotten the road to Prague.
+
+The lady remarked: "People have been more than kind to us here in 
+New York.  We have dined and supped out constantly, and have met 
+with gracious kindness, such as we can never forget.  But so far we 
+have not met a single painter, or author, or sculptor, or a man who 
+has explored a corner of the earth.  Neither have we had the good 
+luck to find ourselves in the same room with Tesla or Rehan, Edison 
+or Drew.  We shall regret so much when back in England and are 
+asked about your people of talent, being obliged to say, 'We never 
+met any of them.'  Why is it?  We have not been in any one circle, 
+and have pitched our tents in many cities, during our tours over 
+here, but always with the same result.  We read your American 
+authors as much as, if not more than, our own.  The names of dozens 
+of your discoverers and painters are household words in England.  
+When my husband planned his first tour over here my one idea was, 
+'How nice it will be!  Now I shall meet those delightful people of 
+whom I have heard so much.'  The disappointment has been complete.  
+Never one have I seen."
+
+I could not but feel how all too true were the remarks of this 
+intelligent visitor, remembering how quick the society of London is 
+to welcome a new celebrity or original character, how a place is at 
+once made for him at every hospitable board, a permanent one to 
+which he is expected to return; and how no Continental 
+entertainment is considered complete without some bright particular 
+star to shine in the firmament.
+
+"Lion-hunting," I hear my reader say with a sneer.  That may be, 
+but it makes society worth the candle, which it rarely is over 
+here.  I realized what I had often vaguely felt before, that the 
+Bohemia the English lady was looking for was not to be found in 
+this country, more's the pity.  Not that the elements are lacking.  
+Far from it, (for even more than in London should we be able to 
+combine such a society), but perhaps from a misconception of the 
+true idea of such a society, due probably to Henry Murger's dreary 
+book SCENES DE LA VIE DE BOHEME which is chargeable with the fact 
+that a circle of this kind evokes in the mind of most Americans 
+visions of a scrubby, poorly-fed and less-washed community, a world 
+they would hardly dare ask to their tables for fear of some 
+embarrassing unconventionality of conduct or dress.
+
+Yet that can hardly be the reason, for even in Murger or Paul de 
+Kock, at their worst, the hero is still a gentleman, and even when 
+he borrows a friend's coat, it is to go to a great house and among 
+people of rank.  Besides, we are becoming too cosmopolitan, and 
+wander too constantly over this little globe, not to have learned 
+that the Bohemia of 1830 is as completely a thing of the past as a 
+GRISETTE or a glyphisodon.  It disappeared with Gavarni and the 
+authors who described it.  Although we have kept the word, its 
+meaning has gradually changed until it has come to mean something 
+difficult to define, a will-o'-the-wisp, which one tries vainly to 
+grasp.  With each decade it has put on a new form and changed its 
+centre, the one definite fact being that it combines the better 
+elements of several social layers.
+
+Drop in, if you are in Paris and know the way, at one of Madeleine 
+Lemaire's informal evenings in her studio.  There you may find the 
+Prince de Ligne, chatting with Rejane or Coquelin; or Henri 
+d'Orleans, just back from an expedition into Africa.  A little 
+further on, Saint-Saens will be running over the keys, preparing an 
+accompaniment for one of Madame de Tredern's songs.  The Princess 
+Mathilde (that passionate lover of art) will surely be there, and - 
+but it is needless to particularize.
+
+Cross the Channel, and get yourself asked to one of Irving's choice 
+suppers after the play.  You will find the bar, the stage, and the 
+pulpit represented there, a "happy family" over which the "Prince" 
+often presides, smoking cigar after cigar, until the tardy London 
+daylight appears to break up the entertainment.
+
+For both are centres where the gifted and the travelled meet the 
+great of the social world, on a footing of perfect equality, and 
+where, if any prestige is accorded, it is that of brains.  When you 
+have seen these places and a dozen others like them, you will 
+realize what the actor's wife had in her mind.
+
+Now, let me whisper to you why I think such circles do not exist in 
+this country.  In the first place, we are still too provincial in 
+this big city of ours.  New York always reminds me of a definition 
+I once heard of California fruit: "Very large, with no particular 
+flavor."  We are like a boy, who has had the misfortune to grow too 
+quickly and look like a man, but whose mind has not kept pace with 
+his body.  What he knows is undigested and chaotic, while his 
+appearance makes you expect more of him than he can give - hence 
+disappointment.
+
+Our society is yet in knickerbockers, and has retained all sorts of 
+littlenesses and prejudices which older civilizations have long 
+since relegated to the mental lumber room.  An equivalent to this 
+point of view you will find in England or France only in the 
+smaller "cathedral" cities, and even there the old aristocrats have 
+the courage of their opinions.  Here, where everything is quite 
+frankly on a money basis, and "positions" are made and lost like a 
+fortune, by a turn of the market, those qualities which are purely 
+mental, and on which it is hard to put a practical value, are 
+naturally at a discount.  We are quite ready to pay for the best.  
+Witness our private galleries and the opera, but we say, like the 
+parvenu in Emile Augier's delightful comedy LE GENDRE DE M. 
+POIRIER, "Patronize art?  Of course!  But the artists?  Never!"  
+And frankly, it would be too much, would it not, to expect a family 
+only half a generation away from an iron foundry, or a mine, to be 
+willing to receive Irving or Bernhardt on terms of perfect 
+equality?
+
+As it would be unjust to demand a mature mind in the overgrown boy, 
+it is useless to hope for delicate tact and social feeling from the 
+parvenu.  To be gracious and at ease with all classes and 
+professions, one must be perfectly sure of one's own position, and 
+with us few feel this security, it being based on too frail a 
+foundation, a crisis in the "street" going a long way towards 
+destroying it.
+
+Of course I am generalizing and doubt not that in many cultivated 
+homes the right spirit exists, but unfortunately these are not the 
+centres which give the tone to our "world."  Lately at one of the 
+most splendid houses in this city a young Italian tenor had been 
+engaged to sing.  When he had finished he stood alone, unnoticed, 
+unspoken to for the rest of the evening.  He had been paid to sing.  
+"What more, in common sense, could he want?" thought the "world," 
+without reflecting that it was probably not the TENOR who lost by 
+that arrangement.  It needs a delicate hand to hold the reins over 
+the backs of such a fine-mouthed community as artists and singers 
+form.  They rarely give their best when singing or performing in a 
+hostile atmosphere.
+
+A few years ago when a fancy-dress ball was given at the Academy of 
+Design, the original idea was to have it an artists' ball; the 
+community of the brush were, however, approached with such a 
+complete lack of tact that, with hardly an exception, they held 
+aloof, and at the ball shone conspicuous by their absence.
+
+At present in this city I know of but two hospitable firesides 
+where you are sure to meet the best the city holds of either 
+foreign or native talent.  The one is presided over by the wife of 
+a young composer, and the other, oddly enough, by two unmarried 
+ladies.  An invitation to a dinner or a supper at either of these 
+houses is as eagerly sought after and as highly prized in the great 
+world as it is by the Bohemians, though neither "salon" is open 
+regularly.
+
+There is still hope for us, and I already see signs of better 
+things.  Perhaps, when my English friend returns in a few years, we 
+may be able to prove to her that we have found the road to Prague.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 11 - Social Exiles
+
+
+BALZAC, in his COMEDIE HUMAINE, has reviewed with a master-hand 
+almost every phase of the Social World of Paris down to 1850 and 
+Thackeray left hardly a corner of London High Life unexplored; but 
+so great have been the changes (progress, its admirers call it,) 
+since then, that, could Balzac come back to his beloved Paris, he 
+would feel like a foreigner there; and Thackeray, who was among us 
+but yesterday, would have difficulty in finding his bearings in the 
+sea of the London world to-day.
+
+We have changed so radically that even a casual observer cannot 
+help being struck by the difference.  Among other most significant 
+"phenomena" has appeared a phase of life that not only neither of 
+these great men observed (for the very good reason that it had not 
+appeared in their time), but which seems also to have escaped the 
+notice of the writers of our own day, close observers as they are 
+of any new development.  I mean the class of Social Exiles, 
+pitiable wanderers from home and country, who haunt the Continent, 
+and are to be found (sad little colonies) in out-of-the-way corners 
+of almost every civilized country.
+
+To know much of this form of modern life, one must have been a 
+wanderer, like myself, and have pitched his tent in many queer 
+places; for they are shy game and not easily raised, frequenting 
+mostly quiet old cities like Versailles and Florence, or 
+inexpensive watering-places where their meagre incomes become 
+affluence by contrast.  The first thought on dropping in on such a 
+settlement is, "How in the world did these people ever drift here?"  
+It is simple enough and generally comes about in this way:
+
+The father of a wealthy family dies.  The fortune turns out to be 
+less than was expected.  The widow and children decide to go abroad 
+for a year or so, during their period of mourning, partially for 
+distraction, and partially (a fact which is not spoken of) because 
+at home they would be forced to change their way of living to a 
+simpler one, and that is hard to do, just at first.  Later they 
+think it will be quite easy.  So the family emigrates, and after a 
+little sight-seeing, settles in Dresden or Tours, casually at 
+first, in a hotel.  If there are young children they are made the 
+excuse.  "The languages are so important!"  Or else one of the 
+daughters develops a taste for music, or a son takes up the study 
+of art.  In a year or two, before a furnished apartment is taken, 
+the idea of returning is discussed, but abandoned "for the 
+present."  They begin vaguely to realize how difficult it will be 
+to take life up again at home.  During all this time their income 
+(like everything else when the owners are absent) has been slowly 
+but surely disappearing, making the return each year more 
+difficult.  Finally, for economy, an unfurnished apartment is 
+taken.  They send home for bits of furniture and family belongings, 
+and gradually drop into the great army of the expatriated.
+
+Oh, the pathos of it!  One who has not seen these poor stranded 
+waifs in their self-imposed exile, with eyes turned towards their 
+native land, cannot realize all the sadness and loneliness they 
+endure, rarely adopting the country of their residence but becoming 
+more firmly American as the years go by.  The home papers and 
+periodicals are taken, the American church attended, if there 
+happens to be one; the English chapel, if there is not.  Never a 
+French church!  In their hearts they think it almost irreverent to 
+read the service in French.  The acquaintance of a few fellow-
+exiles is made and that of a half-dozen English families, mothers 
+and daughters and a younger son or two, whom the ferocious 
+primogeniture custom has cast out of the homes of their childhood 
+to economize on the Continent.
+
+I have in my mind a little settlement of this kind at Versailles, 
+which was a type.  The formal old city, fallen from its grandeur, 
+was a singularly appropriate setting to the little comedy.  There 
+the modest purses of the exiles found rents within their reach, the 
+quarters vast and airy.  The galleries and the park afforded a 
+diversion, and then Paris, dear Paris, the American Mecca, was 
+within reach.  At the time I knew it, the colony was fairly 
+prosperous, many of its members living in the two or three 
+principal PENSIONS, the others in apartments of their own.  They 
+gave feeble little entertainments among themselves, card-parties 
+and teas, and dined about with each other at their respective 
+TABLES D'HOTE, even knowing a stray Frenchman or two, whom the 
+quest of a meal had tempted out of their native fastnesses as it 
+does the wolves in a hard winter.  Writing and receiving letters 
+from America was one of the principal occupations, and an epistle 
+descriptive of a particular event at home went the rounds, and was 
+eagerly read and discussed.
+
+The merits of the different PENSIONS also formed a subject of vital 
+interest.  The advantages and disadvantages of these rival 
+establishments were, as a topic, never exhausted.  MADAME UNE TELLE 
+gave five o'clock tea, included in the seven francs a day, but her 
+rival gave one more meat course at dinner and her coffee was 
+certainly better, while a third undoubtedly had a nicer set of 
+people.  No one here at home can realize the importance these 
+matters gradually assume in the eyes of the exiles.  Their slender 
+incomes have to be so carefully handled to meet the strain of even 
+this simple way of living, if they are to show a surplus for a 
+little trip to the seashore in the summer months, that an extra 
+franc a day becomes a serious consideration.
+
+Every now and then a family stronger-minded than the others, or 
+with serious reasons for returning home (a daughter to bring out or 
+a son to put into business), would break away from its somnolent 
+surroundings and re-cross the Atlantic, alternating between hope 
+and fear.  It is here that a sad fate awaits these modern Rip Van 
+Winkles.  They find their native cities changed beyond recognition.  
+(For we move fast in these days.)  The mother gets out her visiting 
+list of ten years before and is thunderstruck to find that it 
+contains chiefly names of the "dead, the divorced, and defaulted."  
+The waves of a decade have washed over her place and the world she 
+once belonged to knows her no more.  The leaders of her day on 
+whose aid she counted have retired from the fray.  Younger, and 
+alas! unknown faces sit in the opera boxes and around the dinner 
+tables where before she had found only friends.  After a feeble 
+little struggle to get again into the "swim," the family drifts 
+back across the ocean into the quiet back water of a continental 
+town, and goes circling around with the other twigs and dry leaves, 
+moral flotsam and jetsam, thrown aside by the great rush of the 
+outside world.
+
+For the parents the life is not too sad.  They have had their day, 
+and are, perhaps, a little glad in their hearts of a quiet old age, 
+away from the heat and sweat of the battle; but for the younger 
+generation it is annihilation.  Each year their circle grows 
+smaller.  Death takes away one member after another of the family, 
+until one is left alone in a foreign land with no ties around her, 
+or with her far-away "home," the latter more a name now than a 
+reality.
+
+A year or two ago I was taking luncheon with our consul at his 
+primitive villa, an hour's ride from the city of Tangier, a ride 
+made on donkey-back, as no roads exist in that sunny land.  After 
+our coffee and cigars, he took me a half-hour's walk into the 
+wilderness around him to call on his nearest neighbors, whose mode 
+of existence seemed a source of anxiety to him.  I found myself in 
+the presence of two American ladies, the younger being certainly 
+not less than seventy-five.  To my astonishment I found they had 
+been living there some thirty years, since the death of their 
+parents, in an isolation and remoteness impossible to describe, in 
+an Arab house, with native servants, "the world forgetting, by the 
+world forgot."  Yet these ladies had names well known in New York 
+fifty years ago.
+
+The glimpse I had of their existence made me thoughtful as I rode 
+home in the twilight, across a suburb none too safe for strangers.  
+What had the future in store for those two?  Or, worse still, for 
+the survivor of those two?  In contrast, I saw a certain humble 
+"home" far away in America, where two old ladies were ending their 
+lives surrounded by loving friends and relations, honored and 
+cherished and guarded tenderly from the rude world.
+
+In big cities like Paris and Rome there is another class of the 
+expatriated, the wealthy who have left their homes in a moment of 
+pique after the failure of some social or political ambition; and 
+who find in these centres the recognition refused them at home and 
+for which their souls thirsted.
+
+It is not to these I refer, although it is curious to see a group 
+of people living for years in a country of which they, half the 
+time, do not speak the language (beyond the necessities of house-
+keeping and shopping), knowing but few of its inhabitants, and 
+seeing none of the society of the place, their acquaintance rarely 
+going beyond that equivocal, hybrid class that surrounds rich 
+"strangers" and hangs on to the outer edge of the GRAND MONDE.  One 
+feels for this latter class merely contempt, but one's pity is 
+reserved for the former.  What object lessons some lives on the 
+Continent would be to impatient souls at home, who feel 
+discontented with their surroundings, and anxious to break away and 
+wander abroad!  Let them think twice before they cut the thousand 
+ties it has taken a lifetime to form.  Better monotony at your own 
+fireside, my friends, where at the worst, you are known and have 
+your place, no matter how small, than an old age among strangers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 12 - "Seven Ages" of Furniture
+
+
+THE progress through life of active-minded Americans is apt to be a 
+series of transformations.  At each succeeding phase of mental 
+development, an old skin drops from their growing intelligence, and 
+they assimilate the ideas and tastes of their new condition, with a 
+facility and completeness unknown to other nations.
+
+One series of metamorphoses particularly amusing to watch is, that 
+of an observant, receptive daughter of Uncle Sam who, aided and 
+followed (at a distance) by an adoring husband, gradually develops 
+her excellent brain, and rises through fathoms of self-culture and 
+purblind experiment, to the surface of dilettantism and 
+connoisseurship.  One can generally detect the exact stage of 
+evolution such a lady has reached by the bent of her conversation, 
+the books she is reading, and, last but not least, by her material 
+surroundings; no outward and visible signs reflecting inward and 
+spiritual grace so clearly as the objects people collect around 
+them for the adornment of their rooms, or the way in which those 
+rooms are decorated.
+
+A few years ago, when a young man and his bride set up housekeeping 
+on their own account, the "old people" of both families seized the 
+opportunity to unload on the beginners (under the pretence of 
+helping them along) a quantity of furniture and belongings that had 
+(as the shopkeepers say) "ceased to please" their original owners.  
+The narrow quarters of the tyros are encumbered by ungainly sofas 
+and arm-chairs, most probably of carved rosewood.  ETAGERES OF the 
+same lugubrious material grace the corners of their tiny drawing-
+room, the bits of mirror inserted between the shelves distorting 
+the image of the owners into headless or limbless phantoms.  Half 
+of their little dining-room is filled with a black-walnut 
+sideboard, ingeniously contrived to take up as much space as 
+possible and hold nothing, its graceless top adorned with a stag's 
+head carved in wood and imitation antlers.
+
+The novices in their innocence live contented amid their hideous 
+surroundings for a year or two, when the wife enters her second 
+epoch, which, for want of a better word, we will call the Japanese 
+period.  The grim furniture gradually disappears under a layer of 
+silk and gauze draperies, the bare walls blossom with paper 
+umbrellas, fans are nailed in groups promiscuously, wherever an 
+empty space offends her eye.  Bows of ribbon are attached to every 
+possible protuberance of the furniture.  Even the table service is 
+not spared.  I remember dining at a house in this stage of its 
+artistic development, where the marrow bones that formed one course 
+of the dinner appeared each with a coquettish little bow-knot of 
+pink ribbon around its neck.
+
+Once launched on this sea of adornment, the housewife soon loses 
+her bearings and decorates indiscriminately.  Her old evening 
+dresses serve to drape the mantelpieces, and she passes every spare 
+hour embroidering, braiding, or fringing some material to adorn her 
+rooms.  At Christmas her friends contribute specimens of their 
+handiwork to the collection.
+
+The view of other houses and other decorations before long 
+introduces the worm of discontent into the blossom of our friend's 
+contentment.  The fruit of her labors becomes tasteless on her 
+lips.  As the finances of the family are satisfactory, the re-
+arrangement of the parlor floor is (at her suggestion) confided to 
+a firm of upholsterers, who make a clean sweep of the rosewood and 
+the bow-knots, and retire, after some months of labor, leaving the 
+delighted wife in possession of a suite of rooms glittering with 
+every monstrosity that an imaginative tradesman, spurred on by 
+unlimited credit, could devise.
+
+The wood work of the doors and mantels is an intricate puzzle of 
+inlaid woods, the ceilings are panelled and painted in complicated 
+designs.  The "parlor" is provided with a complete set of neat, 
+old-gold satin furniture, puffed at its angles with peacock-colored 
+plush.
+
+The monumental folding doors between the long, narrow rooms are 
+draped with the same chaste combination of stuffs.
+
+The dining-room blazes with a gold and purple wall paper, set off 
+by ebonized wood work and furniture.  The conscientious contractor 
+has neglected no corner.  Every square inch of the ceilings, walls, 
+and floors has been carved, embossed, stencilled, or gilded into a 
+bewildering monotony.
+
+The husband, whose affairs are rapidly increasing on his hands, has 
+no time to attend to such insignificant details as house 
+decoration, the wife has perfect confidence in the taste of the 
+firm employed.  So at the suggestion of the latter, and in order to 
+complete the beauty of the rooms, a Bouguereau, a Toulmouche and a 
+couple of Schreyers are bought, and a number of modern French 
+bronzes scattered about on the multicolored cabinets.  Then, at 
+last, the happy owners of all this splendor open their doors to the 
+admiration of their friends.
+
+About the time the peacock plush and the gilding begin to show 
+signs of wear and tear, rumors of a fresh fashion in decoration 
+float across from England, and the new gospel of the beautiful 
+according to Clarence Cook is first preached to an astonished 
+nation.
+
+The fortune of our couple continuing to develop with pleasing 
+rapidity, the building of a country house is next decided upon.  A 
+friend of the husband, who has recently started out as an 
+architect, designs them a picturesque residence without a straight 
+line on its exterior or a square room inside.  This house is done 
+up in strict obedience to the teachings of the new sect.  The 
+dining-room is made about as cheerful as the entrance to a family 
+vault.  The rest of the house bears a close resemblance to an 
+ecclesiastical junk shop.  The entrance hall is filled with what 
+appears to be a communion table in solid oak, and the massive 
+chairs and settees of the parlor suggest the withdrawing room of 
+Rowena, aesthetic shades of momie-cloth drape deep-set windows, 
+where anaemic and disjointed females in stained glass pluck 
+conventional roses.
+
+To each of these successive transitions the husband has remained 
+obediently and tranquilly indifferent.  He has in his heart 
+considered them all equally unfitting and uncomfortable and sighed 
+in regretful memory of a deep, old-fashioned arm-chair that 
+sheltered his after-dinner naps in the early rosewood period.  So 
+far he has been as clay in the hands of his beloved wife, but the 
+anaemic ladies and the communion table are the last drop that 
+causes his cup to overflow.  He revolts and begins to take matters 
+into his own hands with the result that the household enters its 
+fifth incarnation under his guidance, during which everything is 
+painted white and all the wall-papers are a vivid scarlet.  The 
+family sit on bogus Chippendale and eat off blue and white china.
+
+With the building of their grand new house near the park the couple 
+rise together into the sixth cycle of their development.  Having 
+travelled and studied the epochs by this time, they can tell a 
+Louis XIV. from a Louis XV. room, and recognize that mahogany and 
+brass sphinxes denote furniture of the Empire.  This newly acquired 
+knowledge is, however, vague and hazy.  They have no confidence in 
+themselves, so give over the fitting of their principal floors to 
+the New York branch of a great French house.  Little is talked of 
+now but periods, plans, and elevations.  Under the guidance of the 
+French firm, they acquire at vast expense, faked reproductions as 
+historic furniture.
+
+The spacious rooms are sticky with new gilding, and the flowered 
+brocades of the hangings and furniture crackle to the touch.  The 
+rooms were not designed by the architect to receive any special 
+kind of "treatment."  Immense folding-doors unite the salons, and 
+windows open anywhere.  The decorations of the walls have been 
+applied like a poultice, regardless of the proportions of the rooms 
+and the distribution of the spaces.
+
+Building and decorating are, however, the best of educations.  The 
+husband, freed at last from his business occupations, finds in this 
+new study an interest and a charm unknown to him before.  He and 
+his wife are both vaguely disappointed when their resplendent 
+mansion is finished, having already outgrown it, and recognize that 
+in spite of correct detail, their costly apartments no more 
+resemble the stately and simple salons seen abroad than the cabin 
+of a Fall River boat resembles the GALERIE DES GLACES at 
+Versailles.  The humiliating knowledge that they are all wrong 
+breaks upon them, as it is doing on hundreds of others, at the same 
+time as the desire to know more and appreciate better the perfect 
+productions of this art.
+
+A seventh and last step is before them but they know not how to 
+make it.  A surer guide than the upholsterer is, they know, 
+essential, but their library contains nothing to help them.  Others 
+possess the information they need, yet they are ignorant where to 
+turn for what they require.
+
+With singular appropriateness a volume treating of this delightful 
+"art" has this season appeared at Scribner's.  "The Decoration of 
+Houses" is the result of a woman's faultless taste collaborating 
+with a man's technical knowledge.  Its mission is to reveal to the 
+hundreds who have advanced just far enough to find that they can go 
+no farther alone, truths lying concealed beneath the surface.  It 
+teaches that consummate taste is satisfied only with a perfected 
+simplicity; that the facades of a house must be the envelope of the 
+rooms within and adapted to them, as the rooms are to the habits 
+and requirements of them "that dwell therein;" that proportion is 
+the backbone of the decorator's art and that supreme elegance is 
+fitness and moderation; and, above all, that an attention to 
+architectural principles can alone lead decoration to a perfect 
+development.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 13 - Our Elite and Public Life
+
+
+THE complaint is so often heard, and seems so well founded, that 
+there is a growing inclination, not only among men of social 
+position, but also among our best and cleverest citizens, to stand 
+aloof from public life, and this reluctance on their part is so 
+unfortunate, that one feels impelled to seek out the causes where 
+they must lie, beneath the surface.  At a first glance they are not 
+apparent.  Why should not the honor of representing one's town or 
+locality be as eagerly sought after with us as it is by English or 
+French men of position?  That such is not the case, however, is 
+evident.
+
+Speaking of this the other evening, over my after-dinner coffee, 
+with a high-minded and public-spirited gentleman, who not long ago 
+represented our country at a European court, he advanced two 
+theories which struck me as being well worth repeating, and which 
+seemed to account to a certain extent for this curious abstinence.
+
+As a first and most important cause, he placed the fact that 
+neither our national nor (here in New York) our state capital 
+coincides with our metropolis.  In this we differ from England and 
+all the continental countries.  The result is not difficult to 
+perceive.  In London, a man of the world, a business man, or a 
+great lawyer, who represents a locality in Parliament, can fulfil 
+his mandate and at the same time lead his usual life among his own 
+set.  The lawyer or the business man can follow during the day his 
+profession, or those affairs on which he depends to support his 
+family and his position in the world.  Then, after dinner (owing to 
+the peculiar hours adopted for the sittings of Parliament), he can 
+take his place as a law-maker.  If he be a London-born man, he in 
+no way changes his way of life or that of his family.  If, on the 
+contrary, he be a county magnate, the change he makes is all for 
+the better, as it takes him and his wife and daughters up to 
+London, the haven of their longings, and the centre of all sorts of 
+social dissipations and advancement.
+
+With us, it is exactly the contrary.  As the District of Columbia 
+elects no one, everybody living in Washington officially is more or 
+less expatriated, and the social life it offers is a poor 
+substitute for the circle which most families leave to go there.
+
+That, however, is not the most important side of the question.  Go 
+to any great lawyer of either New York or Chicago, and propose 
+sending him to Congress or the Senate.  His answer is sure to be, 
+"I cannot afford it.  I know it is an honor, but what is to replace 
+the hundred thousand dollars a year which my profession brings me 
+in, not to mention that all my practice would go to pieces during 
+my absence?"  Or again, "How should I dare to propose to my family 
+to leave one of the great centres of the country to go and vegetate 
+in a little provincial city like Washington?  No, indeed!  Public 
+life is out of the question for me!"
+
+Does any one suppose England would have the class of men she gets 
+in Parliament, if that body sat at Bristol?
+
+Until recently the man who occupied the position of Lord Chancellor 
+made thirty thousand pounds a year by his profession without 
+interfering in any way with his public duties, and at the present 
+moment a recordership in London in no wise prevents private 
+practice.  Were these gentlemen Americans, they would be obliged to 
+renounce all hope of professional income in order to serve their 
+country at its Capital.
+
+Let us glance for a moment at the other reason.  Owing to our laws 
+(doubtless perfectly reasonable, and which it is not my intention 
+to criticise,) a man must reside in the place he represents.  Here 
+again we differ from all other constitutional countries.  
+Unfortunately, our clever young men leave the small towns of their 
+birth and flock up to the great centres as offering wider fields 
+for their advancement.  In consequence, the local elector finds his 
+choice limited to what is left - the intellectual skimmed milk, of 
+which the cream has been carried to New York or other big cities.  
+No country can exist without a metropolis, and as such a centre by 
+a natural law of assimilation absorbs the best brains of the 
+country, in other nations it has been found to the interests of all 
+parties to send down brilliant young men to the "provinces," to be, 
+in good time, returned by them to the national assemblies.
+
+As this is not a political article the simple indication of these 
+two causes will suffice, without entering into the question of 
+their reasonableness or of their justice.  The social bearing of 
+such a condition is here the only side of the question under 
+discussion; it is difficult to over-rate the influence that a man's 
+family exert over his decisions.
+
+Political ambition is exceedingly rare among our women of position; 
+when the American husband is bitten with it, the wife submits to, 
+rather than abets, his inclinations.  In most cases our women are 
+not cosmopolitan enough to enjoy being transplanted far away from 
+their friends and relations, even to fill positions of importance 
+and honor.  A New York woman of great frankness and intelligence, 
+who found herself recently in a Western city under these 
+circumstances, said, in answer to a flattering remark that "the 
+ladies of the place expected her to become their social leader," "I 
+don't see anything to lead," thus very plainly expressing her 
+opinion of the situation.  It is hardly fair to expect a woman 
+accustomed to the life of New York or the foreign capitals, to look 
+forward with enthusiasm to a term of years passed in Albany, or in 
+Washington.
+
+In France very much the same state of affairs has been reached by 
+quite a different route.  The aristocracy detest the present 
+government, and it is not considered "good form" by them to sit in 
+the Chamber of Deputies or to accept any but diplomatic positions.  
+They condescend to fill the latter because that entails living away 
+from their own country, as they feel more at ease in foreign courts 
+than at the Republican receptions of the Elysee.
+
+There is a deplorable tendency among our self-styled aristocracy to 
+look upon their circle as a class apart.  They separate themselves 
+more each year from the life of the country, and affect to smile at 
+any of their number who honestly wish to be of service to the 
+nation.  They, like the French aristocracy, are perfectly willing, 
+even anxious, to fill agreeable diplomatic posts at first-class 
+foreign capitals, and are naively astonished when their offers of 
+service are not accepted with gratitude by the authorities in 
+Washington.  But let a husband propose to his better half some 
+humble position in the machinery of our government, and see what 
+the lady's answer will be.
+
+The opinion prevails among a large class of our wealthy and 
+cultivated people, that to go into public life is to descend to 
+duties beneath them.  They judge the men who occupy such positions 
+with insulting severity, classing them in their minds as corrupt 
+and self-seeking, than which nothing can be more childish or more 
+imbecile.  Any observer who has lived in the different grades of 
+society will quickly renounce the puerile idea that sporting or 
+intellectual pursuits are alone worthy of a gentleman's attention.  
+This very political life, which appears unworthy of their attention 
+to so many men, is, in reality, the great field where the nations 
+of the world fight out their differences, where the seed is sown 
+that will ripen later into vast crops of truth and justice.  It is 
+(if rightly regarded and honestly followed) the battle-ground where 
+man's highest qualities are put to their noblest use - that of 
+working for the happiness of others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 14 - The Small Summer Hotel
+
+
+WE certainly are the most eccentric race on the surface of the 
+globe and ought to be a delight to the soul of an explorer, so full 
+is our civilization of contradictions, unexplained habits and 
+curious customs.  It is quite unnecessary for the inquisitive 
+gentlemen who pass their time prying into other people's affairs 
+and then returning home to write books about their discoveries, to 
+risk their lives and digestions in long journeys into Central 
+Africa or to the frozen zones, while so much good material lies 
+ready to their hands in our own land.  The habits of the "natives" 
+in New England alone might occupy an active mind indefinitely, 
+offering as interesting problems as any to be solved by penetrating 
+Central Asia or visiting the man-eating tribes of Australia.
+
+Perhaps one of our scientific celebrities, before undertaking his 
+next long voyage, will find time to make observations at home and 
+collect sufficient data to answer some questions that have long 
+puzzled my unscientific brain.  He would be doing good work.  Fame 
+and honors await the man who can explain why, for instance, sane 
+Americans of the better class, with money enough to choose their 
+surroundings, should pass so much of their time in hotels and 
+boarding houses.  There must be a reason for the vogue of these 
+retreats - every action has a cause, however remote.  I shall await 
+with the deepest interest a paper on this subject from one of our 
+great explorers, untoward circumstances having some time ago forced 
+me to pass a few days in a popular establishment of this class.
+
+During my visit I amused myself by observing the inmates and trying 
+to discover why they had come there.  So far as I could find out, 
+the greater part of them belonged to our well-to-do class, and when 
+at home doubtless lived in luxurious houses and were waited on by 
+trained servants.  In the small summer hotel where I met them, they 
+were living in dreary little ten by twelve foot rooms, containing 
+only the absolute necessities of existence, a wash-stand, a bureau, 
+two chairs and a bed.  And such a bed!  One mattress about four 
+inches thick over squeaking slats, cotton sheets, so nicely 
+calculated to the size of the bed that the slightest move on the 
+part of the sleeper would detach them from their moorings and undo 
+the housemaid's work; two limp, discouraged pillows that had 
+evidently been "banting," and a few towels a foot long with a 
+surface like sand-paper, completed the fittings of the room.  Baths 
+were unknown, and hot water was a luxury distributed sparingly by a 
+capricious handmaiden.  It is only fair to add that everything in 
+the room was perfectly clean, as was the coarse table linen in the 
+dining room.
+
+The meals were in harmony with the rooms and furniture, consisting 
+only of the strict necessities, cooked with a Spartan disregard for 
+such sybarite foibles as seasoning or dressing.  I believe there 
+was a substantial meal somewhere in the early morning hours, but I 
+never succeeded in getting down in time to inspect it.  By 
+successful bribery, I induced one of the village belles, who served 
+at table, to bring a cup of coffee to my room.  The first morning 
+it appeared already poured out in the cup, with sugar and cold milk 
+added at her discretion.  At one o'clock a dinner was served, 
+consisting of soup (occasionally), one meat dish and attendant 
+vegetables, a meagre dessert, and nothing else.  At half-past six 
+there was an equally rudimentary meal, called "tea," after which no 
+further food was distributed to the inmates, who all, however, 
+seemed perfectly contented with this arrangement.  In fact they 
+apparently looked on the act of eating as a disagreeable task, to 
+be hurried through as soon as possible that they might return to 
+their aimless rocking and chattering.
+
+Instead of dinner hour being the feature of the day, uniting people 
+around an attractive table, and attended by conversation, and the 
+meal lasting long enough for one's food to be properly eaten, it 
+was rushed through as though we were all trying to catch a train.  
+Then, when the meal was over, the boarders relapsed into apathy 
+again.
+
+No one ever called this hospitable home a boarding-house, for the 
+proprietor was furious if it was given that name.  He also scorned 
+the idea of keeping a hotel.  So that I never quite understood in 
+what relation he stood toward us.  He certainly considered himself 
+our host, and ignored the financial side of the question severely.  
+In order not to hurt his feelings by speaking to him of money, we 
+were obliged to get our bills by strategy from a male subordinate.  
+Mine host and his family were apparently unaware that there were 
+people under their roof who paid them for board and lodging.  We 
+were all looked upon as guests and "entertained," and our rights 
+impartially ignored.
+
+Nothing, I find, is so distinctive of New England as this graceful 
+veiling of the practical side of life.  The landlady always 
+reminded me, by her manner, of Barrie's description of the bill-
+sticker's wife who "cut" her husband when she chanced to meet him 
+"professionally" engaged.  As a result of this extreme detachment 
+from things material, the house ran itself, or was run by 
+incompetent Irish and negro "help."  There were no bells in the 
+rooms, which simplified the service, and nothing could be ordered 
+out of meal hours.
+
+The material defects in board and lodging sink, however, into 
+insignificance before the moral and social unpleasantness of an 
+establishment such as this.  All ages, all conditions, and all 
+creeds are promiscuously huddled together.  It is impossible to 
+choose whom one shall know or whom avoid.  A horrible burlesque of 
+family life is enabled, with all its inconveniences and none of its 
+sanctity.  People from different cities, with different interests 
+and standards, are expected to "chum" together in an intimacy that 
+begins with the eight o'clock breakfast and ends only when all 
+retire for the night.  No privacy, no isolation is allowed.  If you 
+take a book and begin to read in a remote corner of a parlor or 
+piazza, some idle matron or idiotic girl will tranquilly invade 
+your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of her affairs and the 
+day's gossip.  There is no escape unless you mount to your ten-by-
+twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they visit 
+Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other 
+conveniences.  Even such retirement is resented by the boarders.  
+You are thought to be haughty and to give yourself airs if you do 
+not sit for twelve consecutive hours each day in unending 
+conversation with them.
+
+When one reflects that thousands of our countrymen pass at least 
+one-half of their lives in these asylums, and that thousands more 
+in America know no other homes, but move from one hotel to another, 
+while the same outlay would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings, 
+it does seem as if these modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-
+ouins," were gradually returning to prehistoric habits and would 
+end by eating roots promiscuously in caves.
+
+The contradiction appears more marked the longer one reflects on 
+the love of independence and impatience of all restraint that 
+characterize our race.  If such an institution had been conceived 
+by people of the Old World, accustomed to moral slavery and to a 
+thousand petty tyrannies, it would not be so remarkable, but that 
+we, of all the races of the earth, should have created a form of 
+torture unknown to Louis XI. or to the Spanish Inquisitors, is 
+indeed inexplicable!  Outside of this happy land the institution is 
+unknown.  The PENSION when it exists abroad, is only an exotic 
+growth for an American market.  Among European nations it is 
+undreamed of; the poorest when they travel take furnished rooms, 
+where they are served in private, or go to restaurants or TABLE 
+D'HOTES for their meals.  In a strictly continental hotel the 
+public parlor does not exist.  People do not travel to make 
+acquaintances, but for health or recreation, or to improve their 
+minds.  The enforced intimacy of our American family house, with 
+its attendant quarrelling and back-biting, is an infliction of 
+which Europeans are in happy ignorance.
+
+One explanation, only, occurs to me, which is that among New 
+England people, largely descended from Puritan stock, there still 
+lingers some blind impulse at self-mortification, an hereditary 
+inclination to make this life as disagreeable as possible by self-
+immolation.  Their ancestors, we are told by Macaulay, suppressed 
+bull baiting, not because it hurt the bull, but because it gave 
+pleasure to the people.  Here in New England they refused the Roman 
+dogma of Purgatory and then with complete inconsistency, invented 
+the boarding-house, in order, doubtless, to take as much of the joy 
+as possible out of this life, as a preparation for endless bliss in 
+the next.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 15 - A False Start
+
+
+HAVING had, during a wandering existence, many opportunities of 
+observing my compatriots away from home and familiar surroundings 
+in various circles of cosmopolitan society, at foreign courts, in 
+diplomatic life, or unofficial capacities, I am forced to 
+acknowledge that whereas my countrywoman invariably assumed her new 
+position with grace and dignity, my countryman, in the majority of 
+cases, appeared at a disadvantage.
+
+I take particular pleasure in making this tribute to my "sisters" 
+tact and wit, as I have been accused of being "hard" on American 
+women, and some half-humorous criticisms have been taken seriously 
+by over-susceptible women - doubtless troubled with guilty 
+consciences for nothing is more exact than the old French proverb, 
+"It is only the truth that wounds."
+
+The fact remains clear, however, that American men, as regards 
+polish, facility in expressing themselves in foreign languages, the 
+arts of pleasing and entertaining, in short, the thousand and one 
+nothings composing that agreeable whole, a cultivated member of 
+society, are inferior to their womankind.  I feel sure that all 
+Americans who have travelled and have seen their compatriot in his 
+social relations with foreigners, will agree with this, reluctant 
+as I am to acknowledge it.
+
+That a sister and brother brought up together, under the same 
+influences, should later differ to this extent seems incredible.  
+It is just this that convinces me we have made a false start as 
+regards the education and ambitions of our young men.
+
+To find the reasons one has only to glance back at our past.  After 
+the struggle that insured our existence as a united nation, came a 
+period of great prosperity.  When both seemed secure, we did not 
+pause and take breath, as it were, before entering a new epoch of 
+development, but dashed ahead on the old lines.  It is here that we 
+got on the wrong road.  Naturally enough too, for our peculiar 
+position on this continent, far away from the centres of 
+cultivation and art, surrounded only by less successful states with 
+which to compare ourselves, has led us into forming erroneous ideas 
+as to the proportions of things, causing us to exaggerate the value 
+of material prosperity and undervalue matters of infinitely greater 
+importance, which have been neglected in consequence.
+
+A man who, after fighting through our late war, had succeeded in 
+amassing a fortune, naturally wished his son to follow him on the 
+only road in which it had ever occurred to him that success was of 
+any importance.  So beyond giving the boy a college education, 
+which he had not enjoyed, his ambition rarely went; his idea being 
+to make a practical business man of him, or a lawyer, that he could 
+keep the estate together more intelligently.  In thousands of 
+cases, of course, individual taste and bent over-ruled this 
+influence, and a career of science or art was chosen; but in the 
+mass of the American people, it was firmly implanted that the 
+pursuit of wealth was the only occupation to which a reasonable 
+human being could devote himself.  A young man who was not in some 
+way engaged in increasing his income was looked upon as a very 
+undesirable member of society, and sure, sooner or later, to come 
+to harm.
+
+Millionaires declined to send their sons to college, saying they 
+would get ideas there that would unfit them for business, to 
+Paterfamilias the one object of life.  Under such fostering 
+influences, the ambitions in our country have gradually given way 
+to money standards and the false start has been made!  Leaving 
+aside at once the question of money in its relation to our politics 
+(although it would be a fruitful subject for moralizing), and 
+confining ourselves strictly to the social side of life, we soon 
+see the results of this mammon worship.
+
+In England (although Englishmen have been contemptuously called the 
+shop-keepers of the world) the extension and maintenance of their 
+vast empire is the mainspring which keeps the great machine in 
+movement.  And one sees tens of thousands of well-born and 
+delicately-bred men cheerfully entering the many branches of public 
+service where the hope of wealth can never come, and retiring on 
+pensions or half-pay in the strength of their middle age, 
+apparently without a regret or a thought beyond their country's 
+well-being.
+
+In France, where the passionate love of their own land has made 
+colonial extension impossible, the modern Frenchman of education is 
+more interested in the yearly exhibition at the SALON or in a 
+successful play at the FRANCAIS, than in the stock markets of the 
+world.
+
+Would that our young men had either of these bents!  They have 
+copied from England a certain love of sport, without the English 
+climate or the calm of country and garrison life, to make these 
+sports logical and necessary.  As the young American millionaire 
+thinks he must go on increasing his fortune, we see the anomaly of 
+a man working through a summer's day in Wall Street, then dashing 
+in a train to some suburban club, and appearing a half-hour later 
+on the polo field.  Next to wealth, sport has become the ambition 
+of the wealthy classes, and has grown so into our college life that 
+the number of students in the freshman class of our great 
+universities is seriously influenced by that institution's losses 
+or gains at football.
+
+What is the result of all this?  A young man starts in life with 
+the firm intention of making a great deal of money.  If he has any 
+time left from that occupation he will devote it to sport.  Later 
+in life, when he has leisure and travels, or is otherwise thrown 
+with cultivated strangers, he must naturally be at a disadvantage.  
+"Shop," he cannot talk; he knows that is vulgar.  Music, art, the 
+drama, and literature are closed books to him, in spite of the fact 
+that he may have a box on the grand tier at the opera and a couple 
+of dozen high-priced "masterpieces" hanging around his drawing-
+rooms.  If he is of a finer clay than the general run of his class, 
+he will realize dimly that somehow the goal has been missed in his 
+life race.  His chase after the material has left him so little 
+time to cultivate the ideal, that he has prepared himself a sad and 
+aimless old age; unless he can find pleasure in doing as did a man 
+I have been told about, who, receiving half a dozen millions from 
+his father's estate, conceived the noble idea of increasing them so 
+that he might leave to each of his four children as much as he had 
+himself received.  With the strictest economy, and by suppressing 
+out of his life and that of his children all amusements and 
+superfluous outlay, he has succeeded now for many years in living 
+on the income of his income.  Time will never hang heavy on this 
+Harpagon's hands.  He is a perfectly happy individual, but his 
+conversation is hardly of a kind to attract, and it may be doubted 
+if the rest of the family are as much to be envied.
+
+An artist who had lived many years of his life in Paris and London 
+was speaking the other day of a curious phase he had remarked in 
+our American life.  He had been accustomed over there to have his 
+studio the meeting-place of friends, who would drop in to smoke and 
+lounge away an hour, chatting as he worked.  To his astonishment, 
+he tells me that since he has been in New York not one of the many 
+men he knows has ever passed an hour in his rooms.  Is not that a 
+significant fact?  Another remark which points its own moral was 
+repeated to me recently.  A foreigner visiting here, to whom 
+American friends were showing the sights of our city, exclaimed at 
+last: "You have not pointed out to me any celebrities except 
+millionaires.  'Do you see that man? he is worth ten millions.  
+Look at that house! it cost one million dollars, and there are 
+pictures in it worth over three million dollars.  That trotter cost 
+one hundred thousand dollars,' etc."  Was he not right?  And does 
+it not give my reader a shudder to see in black and white the 
+phrases that are, nevertheless, so often on our lips?
+
+This levelling of everything to its cash value is so ingrained in 
+us that we are unconscious of it, as we are of using slang or local 
+expressions until our attention is called to them.  I was present 
+once at a farce played in a London theatre, where the audience went 
+into roars of laughter every time the stage American said, "Why, 
+certainly."  I was indignant, and began explaining to my English 
+friend that we never used such an absurd phrase.  "Are you sure?" 
+he asked.  "Why, certainly," I said, and stopped, catching the 
+twinkle in his eye.
+
+It is very much the same thing with money.  We do not notice how 
+often it slips into the conversation.  "Out of the fullness of the 
+heart the mouth speaketh."  Talk to an American of a painter and 
+the charm of his work.  He will be sure to ask, "Do his pictures 
+sell well?" and will lose all interest if you say he can't sell 
+them at all.  As if that had anything to do with it!
+
+Remembering the well-known anecdote of Schopenhauer and the gold 
+piece which he used to put beside his plate at the TABLE D'HOTE, 
+where he ate, surrounded by the young officers of the German army, 
+and which was to be given to the poor the first time he heard any 
+conversation that was not about promotion or women, I have been 
+tempted to try the experiment in our clubs, changing the subjects 
+to stocks and sport, and feel confident that my contributions to 
+charity would not ruin me.
+
+All this has had the result of making our men dull companions; 
+after dinner, or at a country house, if the subject they love is 
+tabooed, they talk of nothing!  It is sad for a rich man (unless 
+his mind has remained entirely between the leaves of his ledger) to 
+realize that money really buys very little, and above a certain 
+amount can give no satisfaction in proportion to its bulk, beyond 
+that delight which comes from a sense of possession.  Croesus often 
+discovers as he grows old that he has neglected to provide himself 
+with the only thing that "is a joy for ever" - a cultivated 
+intellect - in order to amass a fortune that turns to ashes, when 
+he has time to ask of it any of the pleasures and resources he 
+fondly imagined it would afford him.  Like Talleyrand's young man 
+who would not learn whist, he finds that he has prepared for 
+himself a dreadful old age!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 16 - A Holy Land
+
+
+NOT long ago an article came under my notice descriptive of the 
+neighborhood around Grant's tomb and the calm that midsummer brings 
+to that vicinity, laughingly referred to as the "Holy Land."
+
+As careless fingers wandering over the strings of a violin may 
+unintentionally strike a chord, so the writer of those lines, all 
+unconsciously, with a jest, set vibrating a world of tender 
+memories and associations; for the region spoken of is truly a holy 
+land to me, the playground of my youth, and connected with the 
+sweetest ties that can bind one's thoughts to the past.
+
+Ernest Renan in his SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE, tells of a Brittany 
+legend, firmly believed in that wild land, of the vanished city of 
+"Is," which ages ago disappeared beneath the waves.  The peasants 
+still point out at a certain place on the coast the site of the 
+fabled city, and the fishermen tell how during great storms they 
+have caught glimpses of its belfries and ramparts far down between 
+the waves; and assert that on calm summer nights they can hear the 
+bells chiming up from those depths.  I also have a vanished "Is" in 
+my heart, and as I grow older, I love to listen to the murmurs that 
+float up from the past.  They seem to come from an infinite 
+distance, almost like echoes from another life.
+
+At that enchanted time we lived during the summers in an old wooden 
+house my father had re-arranged into a fairly comfortable dwelling.  
+A tradition, which no one had ever taken the trouble to verify, 
+averred that Washington had once lived there, which made that hero 
+very real to us.  The picturesque old house stood high on a slope 
+where the land rises boldly; with an admirable view of distant 
+mountain, river and opposing Palisades.
+
+The new Riverside drive (which, by the bye, should make us very 
+lenient toward the men who robbed our city a score of years ago, 
+for they left us that vast work in atonement), has so changed the 
+neighborhood it is impossible now for pious feet to make a 
+pilgrimage to those childish shrines.  One house, however, still 
+stands as when it was our nearest neighbor.  It had sheltered 
+General Gage, land for many acres around had belonged to him.  He 
+was an enthusiastic gardener, and imported, among a hundred other 
+fruits and plants, the "Queen Claude" plum from France, which was 
+successfully acclimated on his farm.  In New York a plum of that 
+kind is still called a "green gage."  The house has changed hands 
+many times since we used to play around the Grecian pillars of its 
+portico.  A recent owner, dissatisfied doubtless with its classic 
+simplicity, has painted it a cheerful mustard color and crowned it 
+with a fine new MANSARD roof.  Thus disfigured, and shorn of its 
+surrounding trees, the poor old house stands blankly by the 
+roadside, reminding one of the Greek statue in Anstey's "Painted 
+Venus" after the London barber had decorated her to his taste.  
+When driving by there now, I close my eyes.
+
+Another house, where we used to be taken to play, was that of 
+Audubon, in the park of that name.  Many a rainy afternoon I have 
+passed with his children choosing our favorite birds in the glass 
+cases that filled every nook and corner of the tumble-down old 
+place, or turning over the leaves of the enormous volumes he would 
+so graciously take down from their places for our amusement.  I 
+often wonder what has become of those vast IN-FOLIOS, and if any 
+one ever opens them now and admires as we did the glowing colored 
+plates in which the old ornithologist took such pride.  There is 
+something infinitely sad in the idea of a collection of books 
+slowly gathered together at the price of privations and sacrifices, 
+cherished, fondled, lovingly read, and then at the owner's death, 
+coldly sent away to stand for ever unopened on the shelves of some 
+public library.  It is like neglecting poor dumb children!
+
+An event that made a profound impression on my childish imagination 
+occurred while my father, who was never tired of improving our 
+little domain, was cutting a pathway down the steep side of the 
+slope to the river.  A great slab, dislodged by a workman's pick, 
+fell disclosing the grave of an Indian chief.  In a low archway or 
+shallow cave sat the skeleton of the chieftain, his bows and arrows 
+arranged around him on the ground, mingled with fragments of an 
+elaborate costume, of which little remained but the bead-work.  
+That it was the tomb of a man great among his people was evident 
+from the care with which the grave had been prepared and then 
+hidden, proving how, hundreds of years before our civilization, 
+another race had chosen this noble cliff and stately river 
+landscape as the fitting framework for a great warrior's tomb.
+
+This discovery made no little stir in the scientific world of that 
+day.  Hundreds came to see it, and as photography had not then come 
+into the world, many drawings were made and casts taken, and 
+finally the whole thing was removed to the rooms of the Historical 
+Society.  From that day the lonely little path held an awful charm 
+for us.  Our childish readings of Cooper had developed in us that 
+love of the Indian and his wild life, so characteristic of boyhood 
+thirty years ago.  On still summer afternoons, the place had a 
+primeval calm that froze the young blood in our veins.  Although we 
+prided ourselves on our quality as "braves," and secretly pined to 
+be led on the war-path, we were shy of walking in that vicinity in 
+daylight, and no power on earth, not even the offer of the tomahawk 
+or snow-shoes for which our souls longed, would have taken us there 
+at night.
+
+A place connected in my memory with a tragic association was across 
+the river on the last southern slope of the Palisades.  Here we 
+stood breathless while my father told the brief story of the duel 
+between Burr and Hamilton, and showed us the rock stained by the 
+younger man's life-blood.  In those days there was a simple iron 
+railing around the spot where Hamilton had expired, but of later 
+years I have been unable to find any trace of the place.  The tide 
+of immigration has brought so deep a deposit of "saloons" and 
+suburban "balls" that the very face of the land is changed, old 
+lovers of that shore know it no more.  Never were the environs of a 
+city so wantonly and recklessly degraded.  Municipalities have vied 
+with millionaires in soiling and debasing the exquisite shores of 
+our river, that, thirty years ago, were unrivalled the world over.
+
+The glamour of the past still lies for me upon this landscape in 
+spite of its many defacements.  The river whispers of boyish 
+boating parties, and the woods recall a thousand childish hopes and 
+fears, resolute departures to join the pirates, or the red men in 
+their strongholds - journeys boldly carried out until twilight 
+cooled our courage and the supper-hour proved a stronger temptation 
+than war and carnage.
+
+When I sat down this summer evening to write a few lines about 
+happy days on the banks of the Hudson, I hardly realized how sweet 
+those memories were to me.  The rewriting of the old names has 
+evoked from their long sleep so many loved faces.  Arms seem 
+reaching out to me from the past.  The house is very still tonight.  
+I seem to be nearer my loved dead than to the living.  The bells of 
+my lost "Is" are ringing clear in the silence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 17 - Royalty At Play
+
+
+FEW more amusing sights are to be seen in these days, than that of 
+crowned heads running away from their dull old courts and 
+functions, roughing it in hotels and villas, gambling, yachting and 
+playing at being rich nobodies.  With much intelligence they have 
+all chosen the same Republican playground, where visits cannot 
+possibly be twisted into meaning any new "combination" or political 
+move, thus assuring themselves the freedom from care or 
+responsibility, that seems to be the aim of their existence.  
+Alongside of well-to-do Royalties in good paying situations, are 
+those out of a job, who are looking about for a "place."  One 
+cannot take an afternoon's ramble anywhere between Cannes and 
+Mentone without meeting a half-dozen of these magnates.
+
+The other day, in one short walk, I ran across three Empresses, two 
+Queens, and an Heir-apparent, and then fled to my hotel, fearing to 
+be unfitted for America, if I went on "keeping such company."  They 
+are knowing enough, these wandering great ones, and after trying 
+many places have hit on this charming coast as offering more than 
+any other for their comfort and enjoyment.  The vogue of these 
+sunny shores dates from their annexation to France, - a price 
+Victor Emmanuel reluctantly paid for French help in his war with 
+Austria.  Napoleon III.'s demand for Savoy and this littoral, was 
+first made known to Victor Emmanuel at a state ball at Genoa.  
+Savoy was his birthplace and his home!  The King broke into a wild 
+temper, cursing the French Emperor and making insulting allusions 
+to his parentage, saying he had not one drop of Bonaparte blood in 
+his veins.  The King's frightened courtiers tried to stop this 
+outburst, showing him the French Ambassador at his elbow.  With a 
+superhuman effort Victor Emmanuel controlled himself, and turning 
+to the Ambassador, said:
+
+"I fear my tongue ran away with me!"  With a smile and a bow the 
+great French diplomatist remarked:
+
+"SIRE, I am so deaf I have not heard a word your Majesty has been 
+saying!"
+
+The fashion of coming to the Riviera for health or for amusement, 
+dates from the sixties, when the Empress of Russia passed a winter 
+at Nice, as a last attempt to prolong the existence of the dying 
+Tsarewitsch, her son.  There also the next season the Duke of 
+Edinburgh wooed and won her daughter (then the greatest heiress in 
+Europe) for his bride.  The world moves fast and a journey it 
+required a matter of life and death to decide on, then, is gayly 
+undertaken now, that a prince may race a yacht, or a princess try 
+her luck at the gambling tables.  When one reflects that the "royal 
+caste," in Europe alone, numbers some eight hundred people, and 
+that the East is beginning to send out its more enterprising 
+crowned heads to get a taste of the fun, that beyond drawing their 
+salaries, these good people have absolutely nothing to do, except 
+to amuse themselves, it is no wonder that this happy land is 
+crowded with royal pleasure-seekers.
+
+After a try at Florence and Aix, "the Queen" has been faithful to 
+Cimiez, a charming site back of Nice.  That gay city is always EN 
+FETE the day she arrives, as her carriages pass surrounded by 
+French cavalry, one can catch a glimpse of her big face, and dowdy 
+little figure, which nevertheless she can make so dignified when 
+occasion requires.  The stay here is, indeed, a holiday for this 
+record-breaking sovereign, who potters about her private grounds of 
+a morning in a donkey-chair, sunning herself and watching her 
+Battenberg grandchildren at play.  In the afternoon, she drives a 
+couple of hours - in an open carriage - one outrider in black 
+livery alone distinguishing her turnout from the others.
+
+The Prince of Wales makes his headquarters at Cannes where he has 
+poor luck in sailing the Brittania, for which he consoles himself 
+with jolly dinners at Monte Carlo.  You can see him almost any 
+evening in the RESTAURANT DE PARIS, surrounded by his own 
+particular set, - the Duchess of Devonshire (who started a 
+penniless German officer's daughter, and became twice a duchess); 
+Lady de Grey and Lady Wolverton, both showing near six feet of 
+slender English beauty; at their side, and lovelier than either, 
+the Countess of Essex.  The husbands of these "Merry Wives" are 
+absent, but do not seem to be missed, as the ladies sit smoking and 
+laughing over their coffee, the party only breaking up towards 
+eleven o'clock to try its luck at TRENTE ET QUARANTE, until a 
+"special" takes them back to Cannes.
+
+He is getting sadly old and fat, is England's heir, the likeness to 
+his mamma becoming more marked each year.  His voice, too, is oddly 
+like hers, deep and guttural, more adapted to the paternal German 
+(which all this family speak when alone) than to his native 
+English.  Hair, he has none, except a little fringe across the back 
+of his head, just above a fine large roll of fat that blushes above 
+his shirt-collar.  Too bad that this discovery of the microbe of 
+baldness comes rather late for him!  He has a pleasant twinkle in 
+his small eyes, and an entire absence of POSE, that accounts 
+largely for his immense and enduring popularity.
+
+But the Hotel Cap Martin shelters quieter crowned heads.  The 
+Emperor and Empress of Austria, who tramp about the hilly roads, 
+the King and Queen of Saxony and the fat Arch-duchess Stephanie.  
+Austria's Empress looks sadly changed and ill, as does another lady 
+of whom one can occasionally catch a glimpse, walking painfully 
+with a crutch-stick in the shadow of the trees near her villa.  It 
+is hard to believe that this white-haired, bent old woman was once 
+the imperial beauty who from the salons of the Tuileries dictated 
+the fashions of the world!  Few have paid so dearly for their brief 
+hour of splendor!
+
+Cannes with its excellent harbor is the centre of interest during 
+the racing season when the Tsarewitsch comes on his yacht Czaritza.  
+At the Battle of Flowers, one is pretty sure to see the Duke of 
+Cambridge, his Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Michael, Prince 
+Christian of Denmark, H.R.H. the Duke of Nassau, H.R.H. the 
+Archduke Ferdinand d'Este, their Serene Highnesses of Mecklenburg-
+Schwerin and the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, also H.R.H. Marie Valerie and 
+the Schleswig-Holsteins, pelting each other and the public with 
+CONFETTI and flowers.  Indeed, half the A1MANACH DE GOTHA, that 
+continental "society list," seems to be sunning itself here and 
+forgetting its cares, on bicycles or on board yachts.  It is said 
+that the Crown Princess of Honolulu (whoever she may be) honors 
+Mentone with her presence, and the newly deposed Queen "Ranavalo" 
+of Madagascar is EN ROUTE to join in the fun.
+
+This crowd of royalty reminds me of a story the old sea-dogs who 
+gather about the "Admirals' corner" of the Metropolitan Club in 
+Washington, love to tell you.  An American cockswain, dazzled by a 
+doubly royal visit, with attending suites, on board the old 
+"Constitution," came up to his commanding officer and touching his 
+cap, said:
+
+"Beg pardon, Admiral, but one of them kings has tumbled down the 
+gangway and broke his leg."
+
+It has become a much more amusing thing to wear a crown than it 
+was.  Times have changed indeed since Marie Laczinska lived the 
+fifty lonely years of her wedded life and bore her many children, 
+in one bed-room at Versailles - a monotony only broken by visits to 
+Fontainebleau or Marly.  Shakespeare's line no longer fits the 
+case.
+
+Beyond securing rich matches for their children, and keeping a 
+sharp lookout that the Radicals at home do not unduly cut down 
+their civil lists, these great ones have little but their 
+amusements to occupy them.  Do they ever reflect, as they rush 
+about visiting each other and squabbling over precedence when they 
+meet, that some fine morning the tax-payers may wake up, and ask 
+each other why they are being crushed under such heavy loads, that 
+eight hundred or more quite useless people may pass their lives in 
+foreign watering-places, away from their homes and their duties?  
+It will be a bad day for them when the long-suffering subjects say 
+to them, "Since we get on so exceedingly well during your many 
+visits abroad, we think we will try how it will work without you at 
+all!"
+
+The Prince of little Monaco seems to be about the only one up to 
+the situation, for he at least stays at home, and in connection 
+with two other gentlemen runs an exceedingly good hotel and several 
+restaurants on his estates, doing all he can to attract money into 
+the place, while making the strictest laws to prevent his subjects 
+gambling at the famous tables.  Now if other royalties instead of 
+amusing themselves all the year round would go in for something 
+practical like this, they might become useful members of the 
+community.  This idea of Monaco's Prince strikes one as most 
+timely, and as opening a career for other indigent crowned heads.  
+Hotels are getting so good and so numerous, that without some 
+especial "attraction" a new one can hardly succeed; but a 
+"Hohenzollern House" well situated in Berlin, with William II. to 
+receive the tourists at the door, and his fat wife at the desk, 
+would be sure to prosper.  It certainly would be pleasanter for him 
+to spend money so honestly earned than the millions wrested from 
+half-starving peasants which form his present income.  Besides 
+there is almost as much gold lace on a hotel employee's livery as 
+on a court costume!
+
+The numerous crowned heads one meets wandering about, can hardly 
+lull themselves over their "games" with the flattering unction that 
+they are of use, for, have they not France before them (which they 
+find so much to their taste) stronger, richer, more respected than 
+ever since she shook herself free of such incumbrances?  Not to 
+mention our own democratic country, which has managed to hold its 
+own, in spite of their many gleeful predictions to the contrary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 18 - A Rock Ahead
+
+
+HAVING had occasion several times during this past season, to pass 
+by the larger stores in the vicinity of Twenty-third Street, I have 
+been struck more than ever, by the endless flow of womankind that 
+beats against the doors of those establishments.  If they were 
+temples where a beneficent deity was distributing health, learning, 
+and all the good things of existence, the rush could hardly have 
+been greater.  It saddened me to realize that each of the eager 
+women I saw was, on the contrary, dispensing something of her 
+strength and brain, as well as the wearily earned stipend of the 
+men of her family (if not her own), for what could be of little 
+profit to her.
+
+It occurred to me that, if the people who are so quick to talk 
+about the elevating and refining influences of women, could take an 
+hour or two and inspect the centres in question, they might not be 
+so firm in their beliefs.  For, reluctant as I am to acknowledge 
+it, the one great misfortune in this country, is the unnatural 
+position which has been (from some mistaken idea of chivalry) 
+accorded to women here.  The result of placing them on this 
+pedestal, and treating them as things apart, has been to make women 
+in America poorer helpmeets to their husbands than in any other 
+country on the face of the globe, civilized or uncivilized.
+
+Strange as it may appear, this is not confined to the rich, but 
+permeates all classes, becoming more harmful in descending the 
+social scale, and it will bring about a disintegration of our 
+society, sooner than could be believed.  The saying on which we 
+have all been brought up, viz., that you can gauge the point of 
+civilization attained in a nation by the position it accords to 
+woman, was quite true as long as woman was considered man's 
+inferior.  To make her his equal was perfectly just; all the 
+trouble begins when you attempt to make her man's superior, a 
+something apart from his working life, and not the companion of his 
+troubles and cares, as she was intended to be.
+
+When a small shopkeeper in Europe marries, the next day you will 
+see his young wife taking her place at the desk in his shop.  While 
+he serves his customers, his smiling spouse keeps the books, makes 
+change, and has an eye on the employees.  At noon they dine 
+together; in the evening, after the shop is closed, are pleased or 
+saddened together over the results of the day.  The wife's DOT 
+almost always goes into the business, so that there is a community 
+of interest to unite them, and their lives are passed together.  In 
+this country, what happens?  The husband places his new wife in a 
+small house, or in two or three furnished rooms, generally so far 
+away that all idea of dining with her is impossible.  In 
+consequence, he has a "quick lunch" down town, and does not see his 
+wife between eight o'clock in the morning and seven in the evening.  
+His business is a closed book to her, in which she can have no 
+interest, for her weary husband naturally revolts from talking 
+"shop," even if she is in a position to understand him.
+
+His false sense of shielding her from the rude world makes him keep 
+his troubles to himself, so she rarely knows his financial position 
+and sulks over his "meanness" to her, in regard to pin-money; and 
+being a perfectly idle person, her days are apt to be passed in a 
+way especially devised by Satan for unoccupied hands.  She has 
+learned no cooking from her mother; "going to market" has become a 
+thing of the past.  So she falls a victim to the allurements of the 
+bargain-counter; returning home after hours of aimless wandering, 
+irritable and aggrieved because she cannot own the beautiful things 
+she has seen.  She passes the evening in trying to win her 
+husband's consent to some purchase he knows he cannot afford, while 
+it breaks his heart to refuse her - some object, which, were she 
+really his companion, she would not have had the time to see or the 
+folly to ask for.
+
+The janitor in our building is truly a toiler.  He rarely leaves 
+his dismal quarters under the sidewalk, but "Madam" walks the 
+streets clad in sealskin and silk, a "Gainsborough" crowning her 
+false "bang."  I always think of Max O'Rell's clever saying, when I 
+see her: "The sweat of the American husband crystallizes into 
+diamond ear-rings for the American woman."  My janitress sports a 
+diminutive pair of those jewels and has hopes of larger ones!  
+Instead of "doing" the bachelor's rooms in the building as her 
+husband's helpmeet, she "does" her spouse, and a char-woman works 
+for her.  She is one of the drops in the tide that ebbs and flows 
+on Twenty-third Street - a discontented woman placed in a false 
+position by our absurd customs.
+
+Go a little further up in the social scale and you will find the 
+same "detached" feeling.  In a household I know of only one horse 
+and a COUPE can be afforded.  Do you suppose it is for the use of 
+the weary breadwinner?  Not at all.  He walks from his home to the 
+"elevated."  The carriage is to take his wife to teas or the park.  
+In a year or two she will go abroad, leaving him alone to turn the 
+crank that produces the income.  As it is, she always leaves him 
+for six months each year in a half-closed house, to the tender 
+mercies of a caretaker.  Two additional words could be 
+advantageously added to the wedding service.  After "for richer for 
+poorer," I should like to hear a bride promise to cling to her 
+husband "for winter for summer!"
+
+Make another step up and stand in the entrance of a house at two 
+A.M., just as the cotillion is commencing, and watch the couples 
+leaving.  The husband, who has been in Wall Street all day, knows 
+that he must be there again at nine next morning.  He is furious at 
+the lateness of the hour, and dropping with fatigue.  His wife, who 
+has done nothing to weary her, is equally enraged to be taken away 
+just as the ball was becoming amusing.  What a happy, united pair 
+they are as the footman closes the door and the carriage rolls off 
+home!  Who is to blame?  The husband is vainly trying to lead the 
+most exacting of double lives, that of a business man all day and a 
+society man all night.  You can pick him out at a glance in a 
+ballroom.  His eye shows you that there is no rest for him, for he 
+has placed his wife at the head of an establishment whose working 
+crushes him into the mud of care and anxiety.  Has he any one to 
+blame but himself?
+
+In England, I am told, the man of a family goes up to London in the 
+spring and gets his complete outfit, down to the smallest details 
+of hat-box and umbrella.  If there happens to be money left, the 
+wife gets a new gown or two: if not, she "turns" the old ones and 
+rejoices vicariously in the splendor of her "lord."  I know one 
+charming little home over there, where the ladies cannot afford a 
+pony-carriage, because the three indispensable hunters eat up the 
+where-withal.
+
+Thackeray was delighted to find one household (Major Ponto's) where 
+the governess ruled supreme, and I feel a fiendish pleasure in 
+these accounts of a country where men have been able to maintain 
+some rights, and am moved to preach a crusade for the liberation of 
+the American husband, that the poor, down-trodden creature may 
+revolt from the slavery where he is held and once more claim his 
+birthright.  If he be prompt to act (and is successful) he may work 
+such a reform that our girls, on marrying, may feel that some 
+duties and responsibilities go with their new positions; and a 
+state of things be changed, where it is possible for a woman to be 
+pitied by her friends as a model of abnegation, because she has 
+decided to remain in town during the summer to keep her husband 
+company and make his weary home-coming brighter.  Or where (as in a 
+story recently heard) a foreigner on being presented to an American 
+bride abroad and asking for her husband, could hear in answer: "Oh, 
+he could not come; he was too busy.  I am making my wedding-trip 
+without him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 19 - The Grand Prix
+
+
+IN most cities, it is impossible to say when the "season" ends.  In 
+London and with us in New York it dwindles off without any special 
+finish, but in Paris it closes like a trap-door, or the curtain on 
+the last scene of a pantomime, while the lights are blazing and the 
+orchestra is banging its loudest.  The GRAND PRIX, which takes 
+place on the second Sunday in June, is the climax of the spring 
+gayeties.  Up to that date, the social pace has been getting faster 
+and faster, like the finish of the big race itself, and fortunately 
+for the lives of the women as well as the horses, ends as suddenly.
+
+In 1897, the last steeple chase at Auteuil, which precedes the 
+GRAND-PRIX by one week, was won by a horse belonging to an actress 
+of the THEATRE FRANCAIS, a lady who has been a great deal before 
+the public already in connection with the life and death of young 
+Lebaudy.  This youth having had the misfortune to inherit an 
+enormous fortune, while still a mere boy, plunged into the wildest 
+dissipation, and became the prey of a band of sharpers and 
+blacklegs.  Mlle. Marie Louise Marsy appears to have been the one 
+person who had a sincere affection for the unfortunate youth.  When 
+his health gave way during his military service, she threw over her 
+engagement with the FRANCAIS, and nursed her lover until his death 
+- a devotion rewarded by the gift of a million.
+
+At the present moment, four or five of the band of self-styled 
+noblemen who traded on the boy's inexperience and generosity, are 
+serving out terms in the state prisons for blackmailing, and the 
+THEATRE FRANCAIS possesses the anomaly of a young and beautiful 
+actress, who runs a racing stable in her own name.
+
+THE GRAND PRIX dates from the reign of Napoleon III., who, at the 
+suggestion of the great railway companies, inaugurated this race in 
+1862, in imitation of the English Derby, as a means of attracting 
+people to Paris.  The city and the railways each give half of the 
+forty-thousand-dollar prize.  It is the great official race of the 
+year.  The President occupies the central pavilion, surrounded by 
+the members of the cabinet and the diplomatic corps.  On the 
+tribunes and lawn can be seen the TOUT PARIS - all the celebrities 
+of the great and half-world who play such an important part in the 
+life of France's capital.  The whole colony of the RASTAQUOUERES, 
+is sure to be there, "RASTAS," as they are familiarly called by the 
+Parisians, who make little if any distinction in their minds 
+between a South American (blazing in diamonds and vulgar clothes) 
+and our own select (?) colony.  Apropos of this inability of the 
+Europeans to appreciate our fine social distinctions, I have been 
+told of a well-born New Yorker who took a French noblewoman rather 
+to task for receiving an American she thought unworthy of notice, 
+and said:
+
+"How can you receive her?  Her husband keeps a hotel!"
+
+"Is that any reason?" asked the French-woman; "I thought all 
+Americans kept hotels."
+
+For the GRAND PRIX, every woman not absolutely bankrupt has a new 
+costume, her one idea being a CREATION that will attract attention 
+and eclipse her rivals.  The dressmakers have had a busy time of it 
+for weeks before.
+
+Every horse that can stand up is pressed into service for the day.  
+For twenty-four hours before, the whole city is EN FETE, and Paris 
+EN FETE is always a sight worth seeing.  The natural gayety of the 
+Parisians, a characteristic noticed (if we are to believe the 
+historians) as far back as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, 
+breaks out in all its amusing spontaneity.  If the day is fine, the 
+entire population gives itself up to amusement.  From early morning 
+the current sets towards the charming corner of the Bois where the 
+Longchamps race-course lies, picturesquely encircled by the Seine 
+(alive with a thousand boats), and backed by the woody slopes of 
+Suresnes and St. Cloud.  By noon every corner and vantage point of 
+the landscape is seized upon, when, with a blare of trumpets and 
+the rattle of cavalry, the President arrives in his turnout A LA 
+DAUMONT, two postilions in blue and gold, and a PIQUEUR, preceded 
+by a detachment of the showy GARDES REPUBLICAINS on horseback, and 
+takes his place in the little pavilion where for so many years 
+Eugenie used to sit in state, and which has sheltered so many 
+crowned heads under its simple roof.  Faure's arrival is the signal 
+for the racing to begin, from that moment the interest goes on 
+increasing until the great "event."  Then in an instant the vast 
+throng of human beings breaks up and flows homeward across the 
+Bois, filling the big Place around the Arc de Triomphe, rolling 
+down the Champs Elysees, in twenty parallel lines of carriages.  
+The sidewalks are filled with a laughing, singing, uproarious crowd 
+that quickly invades every restaurant, CAFE, or chop-house until 
+their little tables overflow on to the grass and side-walks, and 
+even into the middle of the streets.  Later in the evening the 
+open-air concerts and theatres are packed, and every little square 
+organizes its impromptu ball, the musicians mounted on tables, and 
+the crowd dancing gayly on the wooden pavement until daybreak.
+
+The next day, Paris becomes from a fashionable point of view, 
+"impossible."  If you walk through the richer quarters, you will 
+see only long lines of closed windows.  The approaches to the 
+railway stations are blocked with cabs piled with trunks and 
+bicycles.  The "great world" is fleeing to the seashore or its 
+CHATEAUX, and Paris will know it no more until January, for the 
+French are a country-loving race, and since there has been no 
+court, the aristocracy pass longer and longer periods on their own 
+estates each year, partly from choice and largely to show their 
+disdain for the republic and its entertainments.
+
+The shady drives in the park, which only a day or two ago were so 
+brilliant with smart traps and spring toilets, are become a cool 
+wilderness, where will meet, perhaps, a few maiden ladies 
+exercising fat dogs, uninterrupted except by the watering-cart or 
+by a few stray tourists in cabs.  Now comes a delightful time for 
+the real amateur of Paris and the country around, which is full of 
+charming corners where one can dine at quiet little restaurants, 
+overhanging the water or buried among trees.  You are sure of 
+getting the best of attention from the waiters, and the dishes you 
+order receive all the cook's attention.  Of an evening the Bois is 
+alive with a myriad of bicycles, their lights twinkling among the 
+trees like many-colored fire-flies.  To any one who knows how to 
+live there, Paris is at its best in the last half of June and July.  
+Nevertheless, in a couple of days there will not be an American in 
+Paris, London being the objective point; for we love to be "in at 
+the death," and a coronation, a musical festival, or a big race is 
+sure to attract all our floating population.
+
+The Americans who have the hardest time in Paris are those who try 
+to "run with the deer and hunt with the hounds," as the French 
+proverb has it, who would fain serve God and Mammon.  As anything 
+especially amusing is sure to take place on Sunday in this wicked 
+capital, our friends go through agonies of indecision, their 
+consciences pulling one way, their desire to amuse themselves the 
+other.  Some find a middle course, it seems, for yesterday this 
+conversation was overheard on the steps of the American Church:
+
+FIRST AMERICAN LADY: "Are you going to stop for the sermon?"
+
+SECOND AMERICAN LADY: "I am so sorry I can't, but the races begin 
+at one!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 20 - "The Treadmill."
+
+
+A HALF-HUMOROUS, half-pathetic epistle has been sent to me by a 
+woman, who explains in it her particular perplexity.  Such letters 
+are the windfalls of our profession!  For what is more attractive 
+than to have a woman take you for her lay confessor, to whom she 
+comes for advice in trouble? opening her innocent heart for your 
+inspection!
+
+My correspondent complains that her days are not sufficiently long, 
+nor is her strength great enough, for the thousand and one duties 
+and obligations imposed upon her.  "If," she says, "a woman has 
+friends and a small place in the world - and who has not in these 
+days? - she must golf or 'bike' or skate a bit, of a morning; then 
+she is apt to lunch out, or have a friend or two in, to that meal.  
+After luncheon there is sure to be a 'class' of some kind that she 
+has foolishly joined, or a charity meeting, matinee, or reception; 
+but above all, there are her 'duty' calls.  She must be home at 
+five to make tea, that she has promised her men friends, and they 
+will not leave until it is time for her to dress for dinner, 'out' 
+or at home, with often the opera, a supper, or a ball to follow.  
+It is quite impossible," she adds, "under these circumstances to 
+apply one's self to anything serious, to read a book or even open a 
+periodical.  The most one can accomplish is a glance at a paper."
+
+Indeed, it would require an exceptional constitution to carry out 
+the above programme, not to mention the attention that a woman must 
+(however reluctantly) give to her house and her family.  Where are 
+the quiet hours to be found for self-culture, the perusal of a 
+favorite author, or, perhaps, a little timid "writing" on her own 
+account?  Nor does this treadmill round fill a few months only of 
+her life.  With slight variations of scene and costume, it 
+continues through the year.
+
+A painter, I know, was fortunate enough to receive, a year or two 
+ago, the commission to paint a well-known beauty.  He was delighted 
+with the idea and convinced that he could make her portrait the 
+best work of his life, one that would be the stepping-stone to fame 
+and fortune.  This was in the spring.  He was naturally burning to 
+begin at once, but found to his dismay that the lady was just about 
+starting for Europe.  So he waited, and at her suggestion installed 
+himself a couple of months later at the seaside city where she had 
+a cottage.  No one could be more charming than she was, inviting 
+him to dine and drive daily, but when he broached the subject of 
+"sitting," was "too busy just that day."  Later in the autumn she 
+would be quite at his disposal.  In the autumn, however, she was 
+visiting, never ten days in the same place.  Early winter found her 
+"getting her house in order," a mysterious rite apparently attended 
+with vast worry and fatigue.  With cooling enthusiasm, the painter 
+called and coaxed and waited.  November brought the opera and the 
+full swing of a New York season.  So far she has given him half a 
+dozen sittings, squeezed in between a luncheon, which made her 
+"unavoidably late," for which she is charmingly "sorry," and a 
+reception that she was forced to attend, although "it breaks my 
+heart to leave just as you are beginning to work so well, but I 
+really must, or the tiresome old cat who is giving the tea will be 
+saying all sorts of unpleasant things about me."  So she flits off, 
+leaving the poor, disillusioned painter before his canvas, knowing 
+now that his dream is over, that in a month or two his pretty 
+sitter will be off again to New Orleans for the carnival, or 
+abroad, and that his weary round of waiting will recommence.  He 
+will be fortunate if some day it does not float back to him, in the 
+mysterious way disagreeable things do come to one, that she has 
+been heard to say, "I fear dear Mr. Palette is not very clever, for 
+I have been sitting to him for over a year, and he has really done 
+nothing yet."
+
+He has been simply the victim of a state of affairs that neither of 
+them were strong enough to break through.  It never entered into 
+Beauty's head that she could lead a life different from her 
+friends.  She was honestly anxious to have a successful portrait of 
+herself, but the sacrifice of any of her habits was more than she 
+could make.
+
+Who among my readers (and I am tempted to believe they are all more 
+sensible than the above young woman) has not, during a summer 
+passed with agreeable friends, made a thousand pleasant little 
+plans with them for the ensuing winter, - the books they were to 
+read at the same time, the "exhibitions" they were to see, the 
+visits to our wonderful collections in the Metropolitan Museum or 
+private galleries, cosy little dinners, etc.?  And who has not 
+found, as the winter slips away, that few of these charming plans 
+have been carried out?  He and his friends have unconsciously 
+fallen back into their ruts of former years, and the pleasant 
+things projected have been brushed aside by that strongest of 
+tyrants, habit.
+
+I once asked a very great lady, whose gracious manner was never 
+disturbed, who floated through the endless complications of her 
+life with smiling serenity, how she achieved this Olympian calm.  
+She was good enough to explain.  "I make a list of what I want to 
+do each day.  Then, as I find my day passing, or I get behind, or 
+tired, I throw over every other engagement.  I could have done them 
+all with hurry and fatigue.  I prefer to do one-half and enjoy what 
+I do.  If I go to a house, it is to remain and appreciate whatever 
+entertainment has been prepared for me.  I never offer to any 
+hostess the slight of a hurried, DISTRAIT 'call,' with glances at 
+my watch, and an 'on-the-wing' manner.  It is much easier not to 
+go, or to send a card."
+
+This brings me around to a subject which I believe is one of the 
+causes of my correspondent's dilemma.  I fear that she never can 
+refuse anything.  It is a peculiar trait of people who go about to 
+amuse themselves, that they are always sure the particular 
+entertainment they have been asked to last is going to "be 
+amusing."  It rarely is different from the others, but these people 
+are convinced, that to stay away would be to miss something.  A 
+weary-looking girl about 1 A.M. (at a house-party) when asked why 
+she did not go to bed if she was so tired, answered, "the nights I 
+go to bed early, they always seem to do something jolly, and then I 
+miss it."
+
+There is no greater proof of how much this weary round wears on 
+women than the acts of the few who feel themselves strong enough in 
+their position to defy custom.  They have thrown off the yoke (at 
+least the younger ones have) doubtless backed up by their husbands, 
+for men are much quicker to see the aimlessness of this stupid 
+social routine.  First they broke down the great New-Year-call 
+"grind."  Men over forty doubtless recall with a shudder, that 
+awful custom which compelled a man to get into his dress clothes at 
+ten A.M., and pass his day rushing about from house to house like a 
+postman.  Out-of-town clubs and sport helped to do away with that 
+remnant of New Amsterdam.  Next came the male revolt from the 
+afternoon "tea" or "musical."  A black coat is rare now at either 
+of these functions, or if seen is pretty sure to be on a back over 
+fifty.  Next, we lords of creation refused to call at all, or leave 
+our cards.  A married woman now leaves her husband's card with her 
+own, and sisters leave the "pasteboard" of their brothers and often 
+those of their brothers' friends.  Any combination is good enough 
+to "shoot a card."
+
+In London the men have gone a step further.  It is not uncommon to 
+hear a young man boast that he never owned a visiting card or made 
+a "duty" call in his life.  Neither there nor with us does a man 
+count as a "call" a quiet cup of tea with a woman he likes, and a 
+cigarette and quiet talk until dressing time.  Let the young women 
+have courage and take matters into their own hands.  (The older 
+ones are hopeless and will go on pushing this Juggernaut car over 
+each other's weary bodies, until the end of the chapter.)  Let them 
+have the courage occasionally to "refuse" something, to keep 
+themselves free from aimless engagements, and bring this paste-
+board war to a close.  If a woman is attractive, she will be asked 
+out all the same, never fear!  If she is not popular, the few dozen 
+of "egg-shell extra" that she can manage to slip in at the front 
+doors of her acquaintances will not help her much.
+
+If this matter is, however, so vastly important in women's eyes, 
+why not adopt the continental and diplomatic custom and send cards 
+by post or otherwise?  There, if a new-comer dines out and meets 
+twenty-five people for the first time, cards must be left the next 
+day at their twenty-five respective residences.  How the cards get 
+there is of no importance.  It is a diplomatic fiction that the new 
+acquaintance has called in person, and the call will be returned 
+within twenty-four hours.  Think of the saving of time and 
+strength!  In Paris, on New Year's Day, people send cards by post 
+to everybody they wish to keep up.  That does for a year, and no 
+more is thought about it.  All the time thus gained can be given to 
+culture or recreation.
+
+I have often wondered why one sees so few women one knows at our 
+picture exhibitions or flower shows.  It is no longer a mystery to 
+me.  They are all busy trotting up and down our long side streets 
+leaving cards.  Hideous vision!  Should Dante by any chance 
+reincarnate, he would find here the material ready made to his hand 
+for an eighth circle in his INFERNO.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 21 - "Like Master Like Man."
+
+
+A FREQUENT and naive complaint one hears, is of the 
+unsatisfactoriness of servants generally, and their ingratitude and 
+astonishing lack of affection for their masters, in particular.  
+"After all I have done for them," is pretty sure to sum up the long 
+tale of a housewife's griefs.  Of all the delightful 
+inconsistencies that grace the female mind, this latter point of 
+view always strikes me as being the most complete.  I artfully lead 
+my fair friend on to tell me all about her woes, and she is sure to 
+be exquisitely one-sided and quite unconscious of her position.  
+"They are so extravagant, take so little interest in my things, and 
+leave me at a moment's notice, if they get an idea I am going to 
+break up.  Horrid things!  I wish I could do without them!  They 
+cause me endless worry and annoyance."  My friend is very nearly 
+right, - but with whom lies the fault?
+
+The conditions were bad enough years ago, when servants were kept 
+for decades in the same family, descending like heirlooms from 
+father to son, often (abroad) being the foster sisters or brothers 
+of their masters, and bound to the household by an hundred ties of 
+sympathy and tradition.  But in our day, and in America, where 
+there is rarely even a common language or nationality to form a 
+bond, and where households are broken up with such facility, the 
+relation between master and servant is often so strained and so 
+unpleasant that we risk becoming (what foreigners reproach us with 
+being), a nation of hotel-dwellers.  Nor is this class-feeling 
+greatly to be wondered at.  The contrary would be astonishing.  
+From the primitive household, where a poor neighbor comes in as 
+"help," to the "great" establishment where the butler and 
+housekeeper eat apart, and a group of plush-clad flunkies imported 
+from England adorn the entrance-hall, nothing could be better 
+contrived to set one class against another than domestic service.
+
+Proverbs have grown out of it in every language.  "No man is a hero 
+to his valet," and "familiarity breeds contempt," are clear enough.  
+Our comic papers are full of the misunderstandings and absurdities 
+of the situation, while one rarely sees a joke made about the other 
+ways that the poor earn their living.  Think of it for a moment!  
+To be obliged to attend people at the times of day when they are 
+least attractive, when from fatigue or temper they drop the mask 
+that society glues to their faces so many hours in the twenty-four; 
+to see always the seamy side of life, the small expedients, the 
+aids to nature; to stand behind a chair and hear an acquaintance of 
+your master's ridiculed, who has just been warmly praised to his 
+face; to see a hostess who has been graciously urging her guests 
+"not to go so soon," blurt out all her boredom and thankfulness 
+"that those tiresome So-and-So's" are "paid off at last," as soon 
+as the door is closed behind them, must needs give a curious bent 
+to a servant's mind.  They see their employers insincere, and copy 
+them.  Many a mistress who has been smilingly assured by her maid 
+how much her dress becomes her, and how young she is looking, would 
+be thunderstruck to hear herself laughed at and criticised (none 
+too delicately) five minutes later in that servant's talk.
+
+Servants are trained from their youth up to conceal their true 
+feelings.  A domestic who said what she thought would quickly lose 
+her place.  Frankly, is it not asking a good deal to expect a maid 
+to be very fond of a lady who makes her sit up night after night 
+until the small hours to unlace her bodice or take down her hair; 
+or imagine a valet can be devoted to a master he has to get into 
+bed as best he can because he is too tipsy to get there unaided?  
+Immortal "Figaro" is the type!  Supple, liar, corrupt, intelligent, 
+- he aids his master and laughs at him, feathering his own nest the 
+while.  There is a saying that "horses corrupt whoever lives with 
+them."  It would be more correct to say that domestic service 
+demoralizes alike both master and man.
+
+Already we are obliged to depend on immigration for our servants 
+because an American revolts from the false position, though he 
+willingly accepts longer hours or harder work where he has no one 
+around him but his equals.  It is the old story of the free, hungry 
+wolf, and the well-fed, but chained, house-dog.  The foreigners 
+that immigration now brings us, from countries where great class 
+distinctions exist, find it natural to "serve."  With the increase 
+in education and consequent self-respect, the difficulty of getting 
+efficient and contented servants will increase with us.  It has 
+already become a great social problem in England.  The trouble lies 
+beneath the surface.  If a superior class accept service at all, it 
+is with the intention of quickly getting money enough to do 
+something better.  With them service is merely the means to an end.  
+A first step on the ladder!
+
+Bad masters are the cause of so much suffering, that to protect 
+themselves, the great brother-hood of servants have imagined a 
+system of keeping run of "places," and giving them a "character" 
+which an aspirant can find out with little trouble.  This 
+organization is so complete, and so well carried out, that a 
+household where the lady has a "temper," where the food is poor, or 
+which breaks up often, can rarely get a first-class domestic.  The 
+"place" has been boycotted, a good servant will sooner remain idle 
+than enter it.  If circumstances are too much for him and he 
+accepts the situation, it is with his eyes open, knowing infinitely 
+more about his new employers and their failings than they dream of, 
+or than they could possibly find out about him.
+
+One thing never can be sufficiently impressed on people, viz.: that 
+we are forced to live with detectives, always behind us in caps or 
+dress-suits, ready to note every careless word, every incautious 
+criticism of friend or acquaintance - their money matters or their 
+love affairs - and who have nothing more interesting to do than to 
+repeat what they have heard, with embroideries and additions of 
+their own.  Considering this, and that nine people out of ten talk 
+quite oblivious of their servants' presence, it is to be wondered 
+at that so little (and not that so much) trouble is made.
+
+It always amuses me when I ask a friend if she is going abroad in 
+the spring, to have her say "Hush!" with a frightened glance 
+towards the door.
+
+"I am; but I do not want the servants to know, or the horrid things 
+would leave me!"
+
+Poor, simple lady!  They knew it before you did, and had discussed 
+the whole matter over their "tea" while it was an almost unuttered 
+thought in your mind.  If they have not already given you notice, 
+it is because, on the whole your house suits them well enough for 
+the present, while they look about.  Do not worry your simple soul, 
+trying to keep anything from them.  They know the amount of your 
+last dressmaker's bill, and the row your husband made over it.  
+They know how much you would have liked young "Croesus" for your 
+daughter, and the little tricks you played to bring that marriage 
+about.  They know why you are no longer asked to dine at Mrs. 
+Swell's, which is more than you know yourself.  Mrs. Swell 
+explained the matter to a few friends over her lunch-table 
+recently, and the butler told your maid that same evening, who was 
+laughing at the story as she put on your slippers!
+
+Before we blame them too much, however, let us remember that they 
+have it in their power to make great trouble if they choose.  And 
+considering the little that is made in this way, we must conclude 
+that, on the whole, they are better than we give them credit for 
+being, and fill a trying situation with much good humor and 
+kindliness.  The lady who is astonished that they take so little 
+interest in her, will perhaps feel differently if she reflects how 
+little trouble she has given herself to find out their anxieties 
+and griefs, their temptations and heart-burnings; their material 
+situation; whom they support with their slowly earned wages, what 
+claims they have on them from outside.  If she will also reflect on 
+the number of days in a year when she is "not herself," when 
+headaches or disappointments ruffle her charming temper, she may 
+come to the conclusion that it is too much to expect all the 
+virtues for twenty dollars a month.
+
+A little more human interest, my good friends, a little more 
+indulgence, and you will not risk finding yourself in the position 
+of the lady who wrote me that last summer she had been obliged to 
+keep open house for "'Cook' tourists!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 22 - An English Invasion of the Riviera
+
+
+WHEN sixty years ago Lord Brougham, EN ROUTE for Italy, was thrown 
+from his travelling berline and his leg was broken, near the 
+Italian hamlet of Cannes, the Riviera was as unknown to the polite 
+world as the centre of China.  The GRAND TOUR which every young 
+aristocrat made with his tutor, on coming of age, only included 
+crossing from France into Italy by the Alps.  It was the occurrence 
+of an unusually severe winter in Switzerland that turned Brougham 
+aside into the longer and less travelled route VIA the Corniche, 
+the marvellous Roman road at that time fallen into oblivion, and 
+little used even by the local peasantry.
+
+During the tedious weeks while his leg was mending, Lord Brougham 
+amused himself by exploring the surrounding country in his 
+carriage, and was quick to realize the advantages of the climate, 
+and appreciate the marvellous beauty of that coast.  Before the 
+broken member was whole again, he had bought a tract of land and 
+begun a villa.  Small seed, to furnish such a harvest!  To the 
+traveller of to-day the Riviera offers an almost unbroken chain of 
+beautiful residences from Marseilles to Genoa.
+
+A Briton willingly follows where a lord leads, and Cannes became 
+the centre of English fashion, a position it holds to-day in spite 
+of many attractive rivals, and the defection of Victoria who comes 
+now to Cimiez, back of Nice, being unwilling to visit Cannes since 
+the sudden death there of the Duke of Albany.  A statue of Lord 
+Brougham, the "discoverer" of the littoral, has been erected in the 
+sunny little square at Cannes, and the English have in many other 
+ways, stamped the city for their own.
+
+No other race carry their individuality with them as they do.  They 
+can live years in a country and assimilate none of its customs; on 
+the contrary, imposing habits of their own.  It is just this that 
+makes them such wonderful colonizers, and explains why you will 
+find little groups of English people drinking ale and playing golf 
+in the shade of the Pyramids or near the frozen slopes of 
+Foosiyama.  The real inwardness of it is that they are a dull race, 
+and, like dull people despise all that they do not understand.  To 
+differ from them is to be in the wrong.  They cannot argue with 
+you; they simply know, and that ends the matter.
+
+I had a discussion recently with a Briton on the pronunciation of a 
+word.  As there is no "Institute," as in France, to settle matters 
+of this kind, I maintained that we Americans had as much authority 
+for our pronunciation of this particular word as the English.  The 
+answer was characteristic.
+
+"I know I am right," said my Island friend, "because that is the 
+way I pronounce it!"
+
+Walking along the principal streets of Cannes to-day, you might 
+imagine yourself (except for the climate) at Cowes or Brighton, so 
+British are the shops and the crowd that passes them.  Every 
+restaurant advertises "afternoon tea" and Bass's ale, and every 
+other sign bears a London name.  This little matter of tea is 
+particularly characteristic of the way the English have imposed a 
+taste of their own on a rebellious nation.  Nothing is further from 
+the French taste than tea-drinking, and yet a Parisian lady will 
+now invite you gravely to "five o'clocker" with her, although I can 
+remember when that beverage was abhorred by the French as a 
+medicine; if you had asked a Frenchman to take a cup of tea, he 
+would have answered:
+
+"Why?  I am not ill!"
+
+Even Paris (that supreme and undisputed arbiter of taste) has 
+submitted to English influence; tailor-made dresses and low-heeled 
+shoes have become as "good form" in France as in London.  The last 
+two Presidents of the French Republic have taken the oath of office 
+dressed in frock-coats instead of the dress clothes to which French 
+officials formerly clung as to the sacraments.
+
+The municipalities of the little Southern cities were quick to 
+seize their golden opportunity, and everything was done to detain 
+the rich English wandering down towards Italy.  Millions were spent 
+in transforming their cramped, dirty, little towns.  Wide 
+boulevards bordered with palm and eucalyptus spread their sunny 
+lines in all directions, being baptized PROMENADE DES ANGLAIS or 
+BOULEVARD VICTORIA, in artful flattery.  The narrow mountain roads 
+were widened, casinos and theatres built and carnival FETES 
+organized, the cities offering "cups" for yacht- or horse-races, 
+and giving grounds for tennis and golf clubs.  Clever Southern 
+people!  The money returned to them a hundredfold, and they lived 
+to see their wild coast become the chosen residence of the 
+wealthiest aristocracy in Europe, and the rocky hillsides blossom 
+into terrace above terrace of villa gardens, where palm and rose 
+and geranium vie with the olive and the mimosa to shade the white 
+villas from the sun.  To-day, no little town on the coast is 
+without its English chapel, British club, tennis ground, and golf 
+links.  On a fair day at Monte Carlo, Nice, or Cannes, the 
+prevailing conversation is in English, and the handsome, well-
+dressed sons of Albion lounge along beside their astonishing 
+womankind as thoroughly at home as on Bond Street.
+
+Those wonderful English women are the source of unending marvel and 
+amusement to the French.  They can never understand them, and small 
+wonder, for with the exception of the small "set" that surrounds 
+the Prince of Wales, who are dressed in the Parisian fashion, all 
+English women seem to be overwhelmed with regret at not being born 
+men, and to have spent their time and ingenuity since, in trying to 
+make up for nature's mistake.  Every masculine garment is twisted 
+by them to fit the female figure; their conversation, like that of 
+their brothers, is about horses and dogs; their hats and gloves are 
+the same as the men's; and when with their fine, large feet in 
+stout shoes they start off, with that particular swinging gait that 
+makes the skirt seem superfluous, for a stroll of twenty miles or 
+so, Englishwomen do seem to the uninitiated to have succeeded in 
+their ambition of obliterating the difference between the sexes.
+
+It is of an evening, however, when concealment is no longer 
+possible, that the native taste bursts forth, the Anglo-Saxon 
+standing declared in all her plainness.  Strong is the contrast 
+here, where they are placed side by side with all that Europe holds 
+of elegant, and well-dressed Frenchwomen, whether of the "world" or 
+the "half-world," are invariably marvels of fitness and freshness, 
+the simplest materials being converted by their skilful touch into 
+toilettes, so artfully adapted to the wearer's figure and 
+complexion, as to raise such "creations" to the level of a fine 
+art.
+
+An artist feels, he must fix on canvas that particular combination 
+of colors or that wonderful line of bust and hip.  It is with a 
+shudder that he turns to the British matron, for she has probably, 
+for this occasion, draped herself in an "art material," - 
+principally "Liberty" silks of dirty greens and blues (aesthetic 
+shades!).  He is tempted to cry out in his disgust: "Oh, Liberty!  
+Liberty!  How many crimes are committed in thy name!"  It is one of 
+the oddest things in the world that the English should have elected 
+to live so much in France, for there are probably nowhere two 
+peoples so diametrically opposed on every point, or who so 
+persistently and wilfully misunderstand each other, as the English 
+and the French.
+
+It has been my fate to live a good deal on both sides of the 
+Channel, and nothing is more amusing than to hear the absurdities 
+that are gravely asserted by each of their neighbors.  To a Briton, 
+a Frenchman will always be "either tiger or monkey" according to 
+Voltaire; while to the French mind English gravity is only 
+hypocrisy to cover every vice.  Nothing pleases him so much as a 
+great scandal in England; he will gleefully bring you a paper 
+containing the account of it, to prove how true is his opinion.  It 
+is quite useless to explain to the British mind, as I have often 
+tried to do, that all Frenchmen do not pass their lives drinking 
+absinthe on the boulevards; and as Englishmen seem to leave their 
+morals in a valise at Dover when off for a visit to Paris, to be 
+picked up on their return, it is time lost to try to make a Gaul 
+understand what good husbands and fathers the sons of Albion are.
+
+These two great nations seem to stand in the relation to each other 
+that Rome and Greece held.  The English are the conquerors of the 
+world, and its great colonizers; with a vast capital in which 
+wealth and misery jostle each other on the streets; a hideous 
+conglomeration of buildings and monuments, without form and void, 
+very much as old Rome must have been under the Caesars, enormous 
+buildings without taste, and enormous wealth.  The French have 
+inherited the temperament of the Greeks.  The drama, painting, and 
+sculpture are the preoccupation of the people.  The yearly 
+exhibitions are, for a month before they open, the unique subject 
+of conversation in drawing-room or club.  The state protects the 
+artist and buys his work.  Their CONSERVATOIRES form the singers, 
+and their schools the painters and architects of Europe and 
+America.
+
+The English copy them in their big way, just as the Romans copied 
+the masterpieces of Greek art, while they despised the authors.  It 
+is rare that a play succeeds in Paris which is not instantly 
+translated and produced in London, often with the adapter's name 
+printed on the programme in place of the author's, the French-man, 
+who only wrote it, being ignored.  Just as the Greeks faded away 
+and disappeared before their Roman conquerors, it is to be feared 
+that in our day this people of a finer clay will succumb.  The 
+"defects of their qualities" will be their ruin.  They will stop at 
+home, occupied with literature and art, perfecting their dainty 
+cities; while their tougher neighbors are dominating the globe, 
+imposing their language and customs on the conquered peoples or the 
+earth.  One feels this on the Riviera.  It reminds you of the 
+cuckoo who, once installed in a robin's nest, that seems to him 
+convenient and warmly located in the sunshine, ends by kicking out 
+all the young robins.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 23 - A Common Weakness
+
+
+GOVERNMENTS may change and all the conditions of life be modified, 
+but certain ambitions and needs of man remain immutable.  Climates, 
+customs, centuries, have in no way diminished the craving for 
+consideration, the desire to be somebody, to bear some mark 
+indicating to the world that one is not as other men.
+
+For centuries titles supplied the want.  This satisfaction has been 
+denied to us, so ambitious souls are obliged to seek other means to 
+feed their vanity.
+
+Even before we were born into the world of nations, an attempt was 
+made amongst the aristocratically minded court surrounding our 
+chief magistrate, to form a society that should (without the name) 
+be the beginning of a class apart.
+
+The order of the Cincinnati was to have been the nucleus of an 
+American nobility.  The tendencies of this society are revealed by 
+the fact that primogeniture was its fundamental law.  Nothing could 
+have been more opposed to the spirit of the age, nor more at 
+variance with the declaration of our independence, than the 
+insertion of such a clause.  This fact was discovered by the far-
+seeing eye of Washington, and the society was suppressed in the 
+hope (shared by almost all contemporaries) that with new forms of 
+government the nature of man would undergo a transformation and 
+rise above such puerile ambitions.
+
+Time has shown the fallacy of these dreams.  All that has been 
+accomplished is the displacement of the objective point; the 
+desire, the mania for a handle to one's name is as prevalent as 
+ever.  Leave the centres of civilization and wander in the small 
+towns and villages of our country.  Every other man you meet is 
+introduced as the Colonel or the Judge, and you will do well not to 
+inquire too closely into the matter, nor to ask to see the title-
+deeds to such distinctions.  On the other hand, to omit his prefix 
+in addressing one of these local magnates, would be to offend him 
+deeply.  The women-folk were quick to borrow a little of this 
+distinction, and in Washington to-day one is gravely presented to 
+Mrs. Senator Smith or Mrs. Colonel Jones.  The climax being reached 
+by one aspiring female who styles herself on her visiting cards, 
+"Mrs. Acting-Assistant-Paymaster Robinson."  If by any chance it 
+should occur to any one to ask her motive in sporting such an 
+unwieldy handle, she would say that she did it "because one can't 
+be going about explaining that one is not just ordinary Mrs. 
+Robinson or Thompson, like the thousand others in town."  A woman 
+who cannot find an excuse for assuming such a prefix will sometime 
+have recourse to another stratagem, to particularize an ordinary 
+surname.  She remembers that her husband, who ever since he was 
+born has been known to everybody as Jim, is the proud possessor of 
+the middle name Ivanhoe, or Pericles (probably the result of a 
+romantic mother's reading); so one fine day the young couple bloom 
+out as Mr. and Mrs. J. Pericles Sparks, to the amusement of their 
+friends, their own satisfaction, and the hopeless confusion of 
+their tradespeople.
+
+Not long ago a Westerner, who went abroad with a travelling show, 
+was received with enthusiasm in England because it was thought "The 
+Honorable" which preceded his name on his cards implied that 
+although an American he was somehow the son of an earl.  As a 
+matter of fact he owed this title to having sat, many years before 
+in the Senate of a far-western State.  He will cling to that 
+"Honorable" and print it on his cards while life lasts.  I was told 
+the other day of an American carpet warrior who appeared at court 
+function abroad decorated with every college badge, and football 
+medal in his possession, to which he added at the last moment a 
+brass trunk check, to complete the brilliancy of the effect.  This 
+latter decoration attracted the attention of the Heir Apparent, who 
+inquired the meaning of the mystic "416" upon it.  This would have 
+been a "facer" to any but a true son of Uncle Sam.  Nothing 
+daunted, however, our "General" replied "That, Sir, is the number 
+of pitched battles I have won."
+
+I have my doubts as to the absolute veracity of this tale.  But 
+that the son of one of our generals, appeared not long ago at a 
+public reception abroad, wearing his father's medals and 
+decorations, is said to be true.  Decorations on the Continent are 
+official badges of distinction conferred and recognized by the 
+different governments.  An American who wears, out of his own 
+country, an army or college badge which has no official existence, 
+properly speaking, being recognized by no government, but which is 
+made intentionally to look as much as possible like the "Legion 
+d'Honneur," is deliberately imposing on the ignorance of 
+foreigners, and is but little less of a pretentious idiot than the 
+owners of the trunk check and the borrowed decorations.
+
+There seems no end to the ways a little ambitious game can be 
+played.  One device much in favor is for the wife to attach her own 
+family name to that of her husband by means of a hyphen.  By this 
+arrangement she does not entirely lose her individuality; as a 
+result we have a splendid assortment of hybrid names, such as Van 
+Cortland-Smith and Beekman-Brown.  Be they never so incongruous 
+these double-barrelled cognomens serve their purpose and raise 
+ambitious mortals above the level of other Smiths and Browns.  
+Finding that this arrangement works well in their own case, it is 
+passed on to the next generation.  There are no more Toms and Bills 
+in these aspiring days.  The little boys are all Cadwalladers or 
+Carrolls.  Their school-fellows, however, work sad havoc with these 
+high-sounding titles and quickly abbreviate them into humble "Cad" 
+or "Rol."
+
+It is surprising to notice what a number of middle-aged gentlemen 
+have blossomed out of late with decorations in their button-holes 
+according to the foreign fashion.  On inquiry I have discovered 
+that these ornaments designate members of the G.A.R., the Loyal 
+Legion, or some local Post, for the rosettes differ in form and 
+color.  When these gentlemen travel abroad, to reduce their waists 
+or improve their minds, the effects on the hotel waiters and cabmen 
+must be immense.  They will be charged three times the ordinary 
+tariff instead of only the double which is the stranger's usual 
+fate at the hands of simple-minded foreigners.  The satisfaction 
+must be cheap, however, at that price.
+
+Even our wise men and sages do not seem to have escaped the 
+contagion.  One sees professors and clergymen (who ought to set a 
+better example) trailing half a dozen letters after their names, 
+initials which to the initiated doubtless mean something, but which 
+are also intended to fill the souls of the ignorant with envy.  I 
+can recall but one case of a foreign decoration being refused by a 
+compatriot.  He was a genius and we all know that geniuses are 
+crazy.  This gentleman had done something particularly gratifying 
+to an Eastern potentate, who in return offered him one of his 
+second-best orders.  It was at once refused.  When urged on him a 
+second time our countryman lost his temper and answered, "If you 
+want to give it to somebody, present it to my valet.  He is most 
+anxious to be decorated."  And it was done!
+
+It does not require a deeply meditative mind to discover the 
+motives of ambitious struggles.  The first and strongest illusion 
+of the human mind is to believe that we are different from our 
+fellows, and our natural impulse is to try and impress this belief 
+upon others.
+
+Pride of birth is but one of the manifestations of the universal 
+weakness - invariably taking stronger and stronger hold of the 
+people, who from the modest dimension of their income, or other 
+untoward circumstances, can find no outward and visible form with 
+which to dazzle the world.  You will find that a desire to shine is 
+the secret of most of the tips and presents that are given while 
+travelling or visiting, for they can hardly be attributed to pure 
+spontaneous generosity.
+
+How many people does one meet who talk of their poor and 
+unsuccessful relatives while omitting to mention rich and powerful 
+connections?  We are told that far from blaming such a tendency we 
+are to admire it.  That it is proper pride to put one's best foot 
+forward and keep an offending member well out of sight, that the 
+man who wears a rosette in the button-hole of his coat and has half 
+the alphabet galloping after his name, is an honor to his family.
+
+Far be it from me to deride this weakness in others, for in my 
+heart I am persuaded that if I lived in China, nothing would please 
+me more than to have my cap adorned with a coral button, while if 
+fate had cast my life in the pleasant places of central Africa, a 
+ring in my nose would doubtless have filled my soul with joy.  The 
+fact that I share this weakness does not, however, prevent my 
+laughing at such folly in others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 24 - Changing Paris
+
+
+PARIS is beginning to show signs of the coming "Exhibition of 
+1900," and is in many ways going through a curious stage of 
+transformation, socially as well as materially.  The PALAIS DE 
+L'INDUSTRIE, familiar to all visitors here, as the home of the 
+SALONS, the Horse Shows, and a thousand gay FETES and merry-
+makings, is being torn down to make way for the new avenue leading, 
+with the bridge Alexander III., from the Champs Elysees to the 
+Esplanade des Invalides.  This thoroughfare with the gilded dome of 
+Napoleon's tomb to close its perspective is intended to be the 
+feature of the coming "show."
+
+Curious irony of things in this world!  The PALAIS DE L'INDUSTRIE 
+was intended to be the one permanent building of the exhibition of 
+1854.  An old "Journal" I often read tells how the writer saw the 
+long line of gilded coaches (borrowed from Versailles for the 
+occasion), eight horses apiece, led by footmen - horses and men 
+blazing in embroidered trappings - leave the Tuileries and proceed 
+at a walk to the great gateway of the now disappearing palace.  
+Victoria and Albert who were on an official visit to the Emperor 
+were the first to alight; then Eugenie in the radiance of her 
+perfect beauty stepped from the coach (sad omen!) that fifty years 
+before had taken Josephine in tears to Malmaison.
+
+It may interest some ladies to know how an Empress was dressed on 
+that spring morning forty-four years ago.  She wore rose-colored 
+silk with an over-dress (I think that is what it is called) of 
+black lace flounces, immense hoops, and a black CHANTILLY lace 
+shawl.  Her hair, a brilliant golden auburn, was dressed low on the 
+temples, covering the ears, and hung down her back in a gold net 
+almost to her waist; at the extreme back of her head was placed a 
+black and rose-colored bonnet; open "flowing" sleeves showed her 
+bare arms, one-buttoned, straw-colored gloves, and ruby bracelets; 
+she carried a tiny rose-colored parasol not a foot in diameter.
+
+How England's great sovereign was dressed the writer of the journal 
+does not so well remember, for in those days Eugenie was the 
+cynosure of all eyes, and people rarely looked at anything else 
+when they could get a glimpse of her lovely face.
+
+It appears, however, that the Queen sported an India shawl, hoops, 
+and a green bonnet, which was not particularly becoming to her red 
+face.  She and Napoleon entered the building first; the Empress 
+(who was in delicate health) was carried in an open chair, with 
+Prince Albert walking at her side, a marvellously handsome couple 
+to follow the two dowdy little sovereigns who preceded them.  The 
+writer had by bribery succeeded in getting places in an ENTRESOL 
+window under the archway, and was greatly impressed to see those 
+four great ones laughing and joking together over Eugenie's trouble 
+in getting her hoops into the narrow chair!
+
+What changes have come to that laughing group!  Two are dead, one 
+dying in exile and disgrace; and it would be hard to find in the 
+two rheumatic old ladies whom one sees pottering about the Riviera 
+now, any trace of those smiling wives.  In France it is as if a 
+tidal wave had swept over Napoleon's court.  Only the old palace 
+stood severely back from the Champs Elysees, as if guarding its 
+souvenirs.  The pick of the mason has brought down the proud 
+gateway which its imperial builder fondly imagined was to last for 
+ages.  The Tuileries preceded it into oblivion.  The Alpha and 
+Omega of that gorgeous pageant of the fifties vanished like a 
+mirage!
+
+It is not here alone one finds Paris changing.  A railway is being 
+brought along the quais with its depot at the Invalides.  Another 
+is to find its terminus opposite the Louvre, where the picturesque 
+ruin of the Cour des Comptes has stood half-hidden by the trees 
+since 1870.  A line of electric cars crosses the Rond Point, in 
+spite of the opposition of all the neighborhood, anxious to keep, 
+at least that fine perspective free from such desecration.  And, 
+last but not least, there is every prospect of an immense system of 
+elevated railways being inaugurated in connection with the coming 
+world's fair.  The direction of this kind of improvement is 
+entirely in the hands of the Municipal Council, and that body has 
+become (here in Paris) extremely radical, not to say communistic; 
+and takes pleasure in annoying the inhabitants of the richer 
+quarters of the city, under pretext of improvements and facilities 
+of circulation.
+
+It is easy to see how strong the feeling is against the 
+aristocratic class.  Nor is it much to be wondered at!  The 
+aristocracy seem to try to make themselves unpopular.  They detest 
+the republic, which has shorn them of their splendor, and do 
+everything in their power (socially and diplomatically their power 
+is still great) to interfere with and frustrate the plans of the 
+government.  Only last year they seized an opportunity at the 
+funerals of the Duchesse d'Alencon and the Duc d'Aumale to make a 
+royalist manifestation of the most pronounced character.  The young 
+Duchesse d'Orleans was publicly spoken of and treated as the "Queen 
+of France;" at the private receptions given during her stay in 
+Paris the same ceremonial was observed as if she had been really on 
+the throne.  The young Duke, her husband, was not present, being in 
+exile as a pretender, but armorial bearings of the "reigning 
+family," as their followers insist on calling them, were hung 
+around the Madeleine and on the funeral-cars of both the 
+illustrious dead.
+
+The government is singularly lenient to the aristocrats.  If a poor 
+man cries "Long live the Commune!" in the street, he is arrested.  
+The police, however, stood quietly by and let a group of the old 
+nobility shout "Long live the Queen!" as the train containing the 
+young Duchesse d'Orleans moved out of the station.  The secret of 
+this leniency toward the "pretenders" to the throne, is that they 
+are very little feared.  If it amuses a set of wealthy people to 
+play at holding a court, the strong government of the republic 
+cares not one jot.  The Orleans family have never been popular in 
+France, and the young pretender's marriage to an Austrian 
+Archduchess last year has not improved matters.
+
+It is the fashion in the conservative Faubourg St. Germain, to 
+ridicule the President, his wife and their bourgeois surroundings, 
+as forty years ago the parents of these aristocrats affected to 
+despise the imperial PARVENUS.  The swells amused themselves during 
+the official visit of the Emperor and Empress of Russia last year 
+(which was gall and wormwood to them) by exaggerating and repeating 
+all the small slips in etiquette that the President, an 
+intelligent, but simple-mannered gentleman, was supposed to have 
+made during the sojourn of his imperial guests.
+
+Both M. and Mme. Faure are extremely popular with the people, and 
+are heartily cheered whenever they are seen in public.  The 
+President is the despair of the lovers of routine and etiquette, 
+walking in and out of his Palais of the Elysee, like a private 
+individual, and breaking all rules and regulations.  He is fond of 
+riding, and jogs off to the Bois of a morning with no escort, and 
+often of an evening drops in at the theatres in a casual way.  The 
+other night at the Francais he suddenly appeared in the FOYER DES 
+ARTISTES (A beautiful greenroom, hung with historical portraits of 
+great actors and actresses, one of the prides of the theatre) in 
+this informal manner.  Mme. Bartet, who happened to be there alone 
+at the time, was so impressed at such an unprecedented event that 
+she fainted, and the President had to run for water and help revive 
+her.  The next day he sent the great actress a beautiful vase of 
+Sevres china, full of water, in souvenir.
+
+To a lover of old things and old ways any changes in the Paris he 
+has known and loved are a sad trial.  Henri Drumont, in his 
+delightful MON VIEUX PARIS, deplores this modern mania for reform 
+which has done such good work in the new quarters but should, he 
+thinks, respect the historic streets and shady squares.
+
+One naturally feels that the sights familiar in youth lose by being 
+transformed and doubts the necessity of such improvements.
+
+The Rome of my childhood is no more!  Half of Cairo was ruthlessly 
+transformed in sixty-five into a hideous caricature of modern 
+Paris.  Milan has been remodelled, each city losing in charm as it 
+gained in convenience.
+
+So far Paris has held her own.  The spirit of the city has not been 
+lost, as in the other capitals.  The fair metropolis of France, in 
+spite of many transformations, still holds her admirers with a 
+dominating sway.  She pours out for them a strong elixir that once 
+tasted takes the flavor out of existence in other cities and makes 
+her adorers, when in exile, thirst for another draught of the 
+subtle nectar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 25 - Contentment
+
+
+AS the result of certain ideal standards adopted among us when this 
+country was still in long clothes, a time when the equality of man 
+was the new "fad" of many nations, and the prizes of life first 
+came within the reach of those fortunate or unscrupulous enough to 
+seize them, it became the fashion (and has remained so down to our 
+day) to teach every little boy attending a village school to look 
+upon himself as a possible future President, and to assume that 
+every girl was preparing herself for the position of first lady in 
+the land.  This is very well in theory, and practice has shown 
+that, as Napoleon said, "Every private may carry a marshal's baton 
+in his knapsack."  Alongside of the good such incentive may 
+produce, it is only fair, however, to consider also how much harm 
+may lie in this way of presenting life to a child's mind.
+
+As a first result of such tall talking we find in America, more 
+than in any other country, an inclination among all classes to 
+leave the surroundings where they were born and bend their energies 
+to struggling out of the position in life occupied by their 
+parents.  There are not wanting theorists who hold that this is a 
+quality in a nation, and that it leads to great results.  A 
+proposition open to discussion.
+
+It is doubtless satisfactory to designate first magistrates who 
+have raised themselves from humble beginnings to that proud 
+position, and there are times when it is proper to recall such 
+achievements to the rising generation.  But as youth is 
+proverbially over-confident it might also be well to point out, 
+without danger of discouraging our sanguine youngsters, that for 
+one who has succeeded, about ten million confident American youths, 
+full of ambition and lofty aims, have been obliged to content 
+themselves with being honest men in humble positions, even as their 
+fathers before them.  A sad humiliation, I grant you, for a self-
+respecting citizen, to end life just where his father did; often 
+the case, nevertheless, in this hard world, where so many fine 
+qualities go unappreciated, - no societies having as yet been 
+formed to seek out "mute, inglorious Miltons," and ask to crown 
+them!
+
+To descend abruptly from the sublime, to very near the ridiculous, 
+- I had need last summer of a boy to go with a lady on a trap and 
+help about the stable.  So I applied to a friend's coachman, a 
+hard-working Englishman, who was delighted to get the place for his 
+nephew - an American-born boy - the child of a sister, in great 
+need.  As the boy's clothes were hardly presentable, a simple 
+livery was made for him; from that moment he pined, and finally 
+announced he was going to leave.  In answer to my surprised 
+inquiries, I discovered that a friend of his from the same 
+tenement-house in which he had lived in New York had appeared in 
+the village, and sooner than be seen in livery by his play-fellow 
+he preferred abandoning his good place, the chance of being of aid 
+to his mother, and learning an honorable way to earn his living.  
+Remonstrances were in vain; to the wrath of his uncle, he departed.  
+The boy had, at his school, heard so much about everybody being 
+born equal and every American being a gentleman by right of 
+inheritance, that he had taken himself seriously, and despised a 
+position his uncle was proud to hold, preferring elegant leisure in 
+his native tenement-house to the humiliation of a livery.
+
+When at college I had rooms in a neat cottage owned by an American 
+family.  The father was a butcher, as were his sons.  The only 
+daughter was exceedingly pretty.  The hard-worked mother conceived 
+high hopes for this favorite child.  She was sent to a boarding-
+school, from which she returned entirely unsettled for life, having 
+learned little except to be ashamed of her parents and to play on 
+the piano.  One of these instruments of torture was bought, and a 
+room fitted up as a parlor for the daughter's use.  As the family 
+were fairly well-to-do, she was allowed to dress out of all keeping 
+with her parents' position, and, egged on by her mother, tried her 
+best to marry a rich "student."  Failing in this, she became 
+discontented, unhappy, and finally there was a scandal, this poor 
+victim of a false ambition going to swell the vast tide of a city's 
+vice.  With a sensible education, based on the idea that her 
+father's trade was honorable and that her mission in life was to 
+aid her mother in the daily work until she might marry and go to 
+her husband, prepared by experience to cook his dinner and keep his 
+house clean, and finally bring up her children to be honest men and 
+women, this girl would have found a happy future waiting for her, 
+and have been of some good in her humble way.
+
+It is useless to multiply illustrations.  One has but to look about 
+him in this unsettled country of ours.  The other day in front of 
+my door the perennial ditch was being dug for some gas-pipe or 
+other.  Two of the gentlemen who had consented to do this labor 
+wore frock-coats and top hats - or what had once been those 
+articles of attire - instead of comfortable and appropriate 
+overalls.  Why?  Because, like the stable-boy, to have worn any 
+distinctive dress would have been in their minds to stamp 
+themselves as belonging to an inferior class, and so interfered 
+with their chances of representing this country later at the Court 
+of St. James, or presiding over the Senate, - positions (to judge 
+by their criticism of the present incumbents) they feel no doubt as 
+to their ability to fill.
+
+The same spirit pervades every trade.  The youth who shaves me is 
+not a barber; he has only accepted this position until he has time 
+to do something better.  The waiter who brings me my chop at a 
+down-town restaurant would resign his place if he were requested to 
+shave his flowing mustache, and is secretly studying law.  I lose 
+all patience with my countrymen as I think over it!  Surely we are 
+not such a race of snobs as not to recognize that a good barber is 
+more to be respected than a poor lawyer; that, as a French saying 
+goes, IL N'Y A PAS DE SOT METIER.  It is only the fool who is 
+ashamed of his trade.
+
+But enough of preaching.  I had intended - when I took up my pen 
+to-day - to write on quite another form of this modern folly, this 
+eternal struggle upward into circles for which the struggler is 
+fitted neither by his birth nor his education; the above was to 
+have been but a preface to the matter I had in mind, viz., "social 
+climbers," those scourges of modern society, the people whom no 
+rebuffs will discourage and no cold shoulder chill, whose efforts 
+have done so much to make our countrymen a byword abroad.
+
+As many philosophers teach that trouble only is positive, happiness 
+being merely relative; that in any case trouble is pretty equally 
+distributed among the different conditions of mankind; that, 
+excepting the destitute and physically afflicted, all God's 
+creatures have a share of joy in their lives, would it not be more 
+logical, as well as more conducive to the general good, if a little 
+more were done to make the young contented with their lot in life, 
+instead of constantly suggesting to a race already prone to be 
+unsettled, that nothing short of the top is worthy of an American 
+citizen?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 26 - The Climber
+
+
+THAT form of misplaced ambition, which is the subject of the 
+preceding chapter, can only be regarded seriously when it occurs 
+among simple and sincere people, who, however derided, honestly 
+believe that they are doing their duty to themselves and their 
+families when they move heaven and earth to rise a few steps in the 
+world.  The moment we find ambition taking a purely social form, it 
+becomes ridiculous.  The aim is so paltry in comparison with the 
+effort, and so out of proportion with the energy-exerted to attain 
+it, that one can only laugh and wonder!  Unfortunately, signs of 
+this puerile spirit (peculiar to the last quarter of the nineteenth 
+century) can be seen on all hands and in almost every society.
+
+That any man or woman should make it the unique aim and object of 
+existence to get into a certain "set," not from any hope of profit 
+or benefit, nor from the belief that it is composed of brilliant 
+and amusing people, but simply because it passes for being 
+exclusive and difficult of access, does at first seem incredible.
+
+That humble young painters or singers should long to know 
+personally the great lights of their professions, and should strive 
+to be accepted among them is easily understood, since the aspirants 
+can reap but benefit, present and future, from such companionship.  
+That a rising politician should deem it all-important to be on 
+friendly terms with the "bosses" is not astonishing, for those 
+magnates have it in their power to make or mar his fortune.  But in 
+a MILIEU as fluctuating as any social circle must necessarily be, 
+shading off on all sides and changing as constantly as light on 
+water, the end can never be considered as achieved or the goal 
+attained.
+
+Neither does any particular result accompany success, more 
+substantial than the moral one which lies in self-congratulation.  
+That, however, is enough for a climber if she is bitten with the 
+"ascending" madness.  (I say "she," because this form of ambition 
+is more frequent among women, although by no means unknown to the 
+sterner sex.)
+
+It amuses me vastly to sit in my corner and watch one of these FIN-
+DE-SIECLE diplomatists work out her little problem.  She generally 
+comes plunging into our city from outside, hot for conquest, making 
+acquaintances right and left, indiscriminately; thus falling an 
+easy prey to the wolves that prowl around the edges of society, 
+waiting for just such lambs to devour.  Her first entertainments 
+are worth attending for she has ingeniously contrived to get 
+together all the people she should have left out, and failed to 
+attract the social lights and powers of the moment.  If she be a 
+quick-witted lady, she soon sees the error of her ways and begins a 
+process of "weeding" - as difficult as it is unwise, each rejected 
+"weed" instantly becoming an enemy for life, not to speak of the 
+risk she, in her ignorance, runs of mistaking for "detrimentals" 
+the FINES FLEURS of the worldly parterre.  Ah! the way of the 
+Climber is hard; she now begins to see that her path is not strewn 
+with flowers.
+
+One tactful person of this kind, whose gradual "unfolding" was 
+watched with much amusement and wonder by her acquaintances, 
+avoided all these errors by going in early for a "dear friend."  
+Having, after mature reflection, chosen her guide among the most 
+exclusive of the young matrons, she proceeded quietly to pay her 
+court EN REGLE.  Flattering little notes, boxes of candy, and 
+bunches of flowers were among the forms her devotion took.  As a 
+natural result, these two ladies became inseparable, and the most 
+hermetically sealed doors opened before the new arrival.
+
+A talent for music or acting is another aid.  A few years ago an 
+entire family were floated into the desired haven on the waves of 
+the sister's voice, and one young couple achieved success by the 
+husband's aptitude for games and sports.  In the latter case it was 
+the man of the family who did the work, dragging his wife up after 
+him.  A polo pony is hardly one's idea of a battle-horse, but in 
+this case it bore its rider on to success.
+
+Once climbers have succeeded in installing themselves in the 
+stronghold of their ambitions, they become more exclusive than 
+their new friends ever dreamed of being, and it tries one's self-
+restraint to hear these new arrivals deploring "the levelling 
+tendencies of the age," or wondering "how nice people can be 
+beginning to call on those horrid So-and-Sos.  Their father sold 
+shoes, you know."  This ultra-exclusiveness is not to be wondered 
+at.  The only attraction the circle they have just entered has for 
+the climbers is its exclusiveness, and they do not intend that it 
+shall lose its market value in their hands.  Like Baudelaire, they 
+believe that "it is only the small number saved that makes the 
+charm of Paradise."  Having spent hard cash in this investment, 
+they have every intention of getting their money's worth.
+
+In order to give outsiders a vivid impression of the footing on 
+which they stand with the great of the world, all the women they 
+have just met become Nellys and Jennys, and all the men Dicks and 
+Freds - behind their backs, BIEN ENTENDU - for Mrs. "Newcome" has 
+not yet reached that point of intimacy which warrants using such 
+abbreviations directly to the owners.
+
+Another amiable weakness common to the climber is that of knowing 
+everybody.  No name can be mentioned at home or abroad but Parvenu 
+happens to be on the most intimate terms with the owner, and when 
+he is conversing, great names drop out of his mouth as plentifully 
+as did the pearls from the pretty lips of the girl in the fairy 
+story.  All the world knows how such a gentleman, being asked on 
+his return from the East if he had seen "the Dardanelles," 
+answered, "Oh, dear, yes!  I dined with them several times!" thus 
+settling satisfactorily his standing in the Orient!
+
+Climbing, like every other habit, soon takes possession of the 
+whole nature.  To abstain from it is torture.  Napoleon, we are 
+told, found it impossible to rest contented on his successes, but 
+was impelled onward by a force stronger than his volition.  In some 
+such spirit the ambitious souls here referred to, after "the 
+Conquest of America" and the discovery that the fruit of their 
+struggles was not worth very much, victory having brought the 
+inevitable satiety in its wake, sail away in search of new fields 
+of adventure.  They have long ago left behind the friends and 
+acquaintances of their childhood.  Relations they apparently have 
+none, which accounts for the curious phenomenon that a parvenu is 
+never in mourning.  As no friendships bind them to their new 
+circle, the ties are easily loosened.  Why should they care for one 
+city more than for another, unless it offer more of the sport they 
+love?  This continent has become tame, since there is no longer any 
+struggle, while over the sea vast hunting grounds and game worthy 
+of their powder, form an irresistible temptation - old and 
+exclusive societies to be besieged, and contests to be waged 
+compared to which their American experiences are but light 
+skirmishes.  As the polo pony is supposed to pant for the fray, so 
+the hearts of social conquerors warm within them at the prospect of 
+more brilliant victories.
+
+The pleasure of following them on their hunting parties abroad will 
+have to be deferred, so vast is the subject, so full of thrilling 
+adventure and, alas! also of humiliating defeat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 27 - The Last of the Dandies
+
+
+SO completely has the dandy disappeared from among us, that even 
+the word has an old-time look (as if it had strayed out of some 
+half-forgotten novel or "keepsake"), raising in our minds the 
+picture of a slender, clean-shaven youth, in very tight 
+unmentionables strapped under his feet, a dark green frock-coat 
+with a collar up to the ears and a stock whose folds cover his 
+chest, butter-colored gloves, and a hat - oh! a hat that would 
+collect a crowd in two minutes in any neighborhood!  A gold-headed 
+stick, and a quizzing glass, with a black ribbon an inch wide, 
+complete the toilet.  In such a rig did the swells of the last 
+generation stroll down Pall Mall or drive their tilburys in the 
+Bois.
+
+The recent illness of the Prince de Sagan has made a strange and 
+sad impression in many circles in Paris, for he has always been a 
+favorite, and is the last surviving type of a now extinct species.  
+He is the last Dandy!  No understudy will be found to fill his role 
+- the dude and the swell are whole generations away from the dandy, 
+of which they are but feeble reflections - the comedy will have to 
+be continued now, without its leading gentleman.  With his head of 
+silvery hair, his eye-glass and his wonderful waistcoats, he held 
+the first place in the "high life" of the French capital.
+
+No first night or ball was complete without him, Sagan.  The very 
+mention of his name in their articles must have kept the wolf from 
+the door of needy reporters.  No DEBUTANTE, social or theatrical, 
+felt sure of her success until it had received the hall-mark of his 
+approval.  When he assisted at a dress rehearsal, the actors and 
+the managers paid him more attention than Sarcey or Sardou, for he 
+was known to be the real arbiter of their fate.  His word was law, 
+the world bowed before it as before the will of an autocrat.  
+Mature matrons received his dictates with the same reverence that 
+the Old Guard evinced for Napoleon's orders.  Had he not led them 
+on to victory in their youth?
+
+On the boulevards or at a race-course, he was the one person always 
+known by sight and pointed out.  "There goes Sagan!"  He had become 
+an institution.  One does not know exactly how or why he achieved 
+the position, which made him the most followed, flattered, and 
+copied man of his day.  It certainly was unique!
+
+The Prince of Sagan is descended from Maurice de Saxe (the natural 
+son of the King of Saxony and Aurora of Koenigsmark), who in his 
+day shone brilliantly at the French court and was so madly loved by 
+Adrienne Lecouvreur.  From his great ancestor, Sagan inherited the 
+title of Grand Duke Of Courland (the estates have been absorbed 
+into a neighboring empire).  Nevertheless, he is still an R.H., and 
+when crowned heads visit Paris they dine with him and receive him 
+on a footing of equality.  He married a great fortune, and the 
+daughter of the banker Selliere.  Their house on the Esplanade des 
+Invalides has been for years the centre of aristocratic life in 
+Paris; not the most exclusive circle, but certainly the gayest of 
+this gay capital, and from the days of Louis Philippe he has given 
+the keynote to the fast set.
+
+Oddly enough, he has always been a great favorite with the lower 
+classes (a popularity shared by all the famous dandies of history).  
+The people appear to find in them the personification of all 
+aspirations toward the elegant and the ideal.  Alcibiades, 
+Buckingham, the Duc de Richelieu, Lord Seymour, Comte d'Orsay, 
+Brummel, Grammont-Caderousse, shared this favor, and have remained 
+legendary characters, to whom their disdain for everything vulgar, 
+their worship of their own persons, and many costly follies gave an 
+ephemeral empire.  Their power was the more arbitrary and despotic 
+in that it was only nominal and undefined, allowing them to rule 
+over the fashions, the tastes, and the pastimes of their 
+contemporaries with undivided sway, making them envied, obeyed, 
+loved, but rarely overthrown.
+
+It has been asserted by some writers that dandies are necessary and 
+useful to a nation (Thackeray admired them and pointed out that 
+they have a most difficult and delicate role to play, hence their 
+rarity), and that these butterflies, as one finds them in the 
+novels of that day, the de Marsys, the Pelhams, the Maxime de 
+Trailles, are indispensable to the perfection of society.  It is a 
+great misfortune to a country to have no dandies, those supreme 
+virtuosos of taste and distinction.  Germany, which glories in 
+Mozart and Kant, Goethe and Humboldt, the country of deep thinkers 
+and brave soldiers, never had a great dandy, and so has remained 
+behind England or France in all that constitutes the graceful side 
+of life, the refinements of social intercourse, and the art of 
+living.  France will perceive too late, after he has disappeared, 
+the loss she has sustained when this Prince, Grand Seigneur, has 
+ceased to embellish by his presence her race-courses and "first 
+nights."  A reputation like his cannot be improvised in a moment, 
+and he has no pupils.
+
+Never did the aristocracy of a country stand in greater need of 
+such a representation, than in these days of tramcars and "fixed-
+price" restaurants.  An entire "art" dies with him.  It has been 
+whispered that he has not entirely justified his reputation, that 
+the accounts of his exploits as a HAUT VIVEUR have gained in the 
+telling.  Nevertheless he dominated an epoch, rising above the 
+tumultuous and levelling society of his day, a tardy Don Quixote, 
+of the knighthood of pleasures, FETES, loves and prodigalities, 
+which are no longer of our time.  His great name, his grand manner, 
+his elderly graces, his serene carelessness, made him a being by 
+himself.  No one will succeed this master of departed elegances.  
+If he does not recover from his attack, if the paralysis does not 
+leave that poor brain, worn out with doing nothing, we can honestly 
+say that he is the last of his kind.
+
+An original and independent thinker has asserted that 
+civilizations, societies, empires, and republics go down to 
+posterity typified for the admiration of mankind, each under the 
+form of some hero.  Emerson would have given a place in his 
+Pantheon to Sagan.  For it is he who sustained the traditions and 
+became the type of that distinguished and frivolous society, which 
+judged that serious things were of no importance, enthusiasm a 
+waste of time, literature a bore; that nothing was interesting and 
+worthy of occupying their attention except the elegant distractions 
+that helped to pass their days-and nights!  He had the merit (?) in 
+these days of the practical and the commonplace, of preserving in 
+his gracious person all the charming uselessness of a courtier in a 
+country where there was no longer a court.
+
+What a strange sight it would be if this departing dandy could, 
+before he leaves for ever the theatre of so many triumphs, take his 
+place at some street corner, and review the shades of the 
+companions his long life had thrown him with, the endless 
+procession of departed belles and beaux, who, in their youth, had, 
+under his rule, helped to dictate the fashions and lead the sports 
+of a world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 28 - A Nation on the Wing
+
+
+ON being taken the other day through a large and costly residence, 
+with the thoroughness that only the owner of a new house has the 
+cruelty to inflict on his victims, not allowing them to pass a 
+closet or an electric bell without having its particular use and 
+convenience explained, forcing them to look up coal-slides, and 
+down air-shafts and to visit every secret place, from the cellar to 
+the fire-escape, I noticed that a peculiar arrangement of the rooms 
+repeated itself on each floor, and several times on a floor.  I 
+remarked it to my host.
+
+"You observe it," he said, with a blush of pride, "it is my wife's 
+idea!  The truth is, my daughters are of a marrying age, and my 
+sons starting out for themselves; this house will soon be much too 
+big for two old people to live in alone.  We have planned it so 
+that at any time it can be changed into an apartment house at a 
+nominal expense.  It is even wired and plumbed with that end in 
+view!"
+
+This answer positively took my breath away.  I looked at my host in 
+amazement.  It was hard to believe that a man past middle age, who 
+after years of hardest toil could afford to put half a million into 
+a house for himself and his children, and store it with beautiful 
+things, would have the courage to look so far into the future as to 
+see all his work undone, his home turned to another use and himself 
+and his wife afloat in the world without a roof over their wealthy 
+old heads.
+
+Surely this was the Spirit of the Age in its purest expression, the 
+more strikingly so that he seemed to feel pride rather than 
+anything else in his ingenious combination.
+
+He liked the city he had built in well enough now, but nothing 
+proved to him that he would like it later.  He and his wife had 
+lived in twenty cities since they began their brave fight with 
+Fortune, far away in a little Eastern town.  They had since changed 
+their abode with each ascending rung of the ladder of success, and 
+beyond a faded daguerreotype or two of their children and a few 
+modest pieces of jewelry, stored away in cotton, it is doubtful if 
+they owned a single object belonging to their early life.
+
+Another case occurs to me.  Near the village where I pass my 
+summers, there lived an elderly, childless couple on a splendid 
+estate combining everything a fastidious taste could demand.  One 
+fine morning this place was sold, the important library divided 
+between the village and their native city, the furniture sold or 
+given away, - everything went; at the end the things no one wanted 
+were made into a bon-fire and burned.
+
+A neighbor asking why all this was being done was told by the lady, 
+"We were tired of it all and have decided to be 'Bohemians' for the 
+rest of our lives."  This couple are now wandering about Europe and 
+half a dozen trunks contain their belongings.
+
+These are, of course, extreme cases and must be taken for what they 
+are worth; nevertheless they are straws showing which way the wind 
+blows, signs of the times that he who runs may read.  I do not run, 
+but I often saunter up our principal avenue, and always find myself 
+wondering what will be the future of the splendid residences that 
+grace that thoroughfare as it nears the Park; the ascending tide of 
+trade is already circling round them and each year sees one or more 
+crumble away and disappear.
+
+The finer buildings may remain, turned into clubs or restaurants, 
+but the greater part of the newer ones are so ill-adapted to any 
+other use than that for which they are built that their future 
+seems obscure.
+
+That fashion will flit away from its present haunts there can be 
+little doubt; the city below the Park is sure to be given up to 
+business, and even the fine frontage on that green space will 
+sooner or later be occupied by hotels, if not stores; and he who 
+builds with any belief in the permanency of his surroundings must 
+indeed be of a hopeful disposition.
+
+A good lady occupying a delightful corner on this same avenue, 
+opposite a one-story florist's shop, said:
+
+"I shall remain here until they build across the way; then I 
+suppose I shall have to move."
+
+So after all the man who is contented to live in a future apartment 
+house, may not be so very far wrong.
+
+A case of the opposite kind is that of a great millionaire, who, 
+dying, left his house and its collections to his eldest son and his 
+grandson after him, on the condition that they should continue to 
+live in it.
+
+Here was an attempt to keep together a home with its memories and 
+associations.  What has been the result?  The street that was a 
+charming centre for residences twenty years ago has become a 
+"slum;" the unfortunate heirs find themselves with a house on their 
+hands that they cannot live in and are forbidden to rent or sell.  
+As a final result the will must in all probability be broken and 
+the matter ended.
+
+Of course the reason for a great deal of this is the phenomenal 
+growth of our larger cities.  Hundreds of families who would gladly 
+remain in their old homes are fairly pushed out of them by the 
+growth of business.
+
+Everything has its limits and a time must come when our cities will 
+cease to expand or when centres will be formed as in London or 
+Paris, where generations may succeed each other in the same homes.  
+So far, I see no indications of any such crystallization in this 
+our big city; we seem to be condemned like the "Wandering Jew" or 
+poor little "Joe" to be perpetually "moving on."
+
+At a dinner of young people not long ago a Frenchman visiting our 
+country, expressed his surprise on hearing a girl speak of "not 
+remembering the house she was born in."  Piqued by his manner the 
+young lady answered:
+
+"We are twenty-four at this table.  I do not believe there is one 
+person here living in the house in which he or she was born."  This 
+assertion raised a murmur of dissent around the table; on a census 
+being taken it proved, however, to be true.
+
+How can one expect, under circumstances like these, to find any 
+great respect among young people for home life or the conservative 
+side of existence?  They are born as it were on the wing, and on 
+the wing will they live.
+
+The conditions of life in this country, although contributing 
+largely to such a state of affairs, must not be held, however, 
+entirely responsible.  Underlying our civilization and culture, 
+there is still strong in us a wild nomadic strain inherited from a 
+thousand generations of wandering ancestors, which breaks out so 
+soon as man is freed from the restraint incumbent on bread-winning 
+for his family.  The moment there is wealth or even a modest income 
+insured, comes the inclination to cut loose from the dull routine 
+of business and duty, returning instinctively to the migratory 
+habits of primitive man.
+
+We are not the only nation that has given itself up to globe-
+trotting; it is strong in the English, in spite of their 
+conservative education, and it is surprising to see the number of 
+formerly stay-at-home French and Germans one meets wandering in 
+foreign lands.
+
+In 1855, a Londoner advertised the plan he had conceived of taking 
+some people over to visit the International Exhibition in Paris.  
+For a fixed sum paid in advance he offered to provide everything 
+and act as courier to the party, and succeeded with the greatest 
+difficulty in getting together ten people.  From this modest 
+beginning has grown the vast undertaking that to-day covers the 
+globe with tourists, from the frozen seas where they "do" the 
+midnight sun, to the deserts three thousand miles up the Nile.
+
+As I was returning a couple of years ago VIA Vienna from 
+Constantinople, the train was filled with a party of our 
+compatriots conducted by an agency of this kind - simple people of 
+small means who, twenty years ago, would as soon have thought of 
+leaving their homes for a trip in the East as they would of 
+starting off in balloons en route for the inter-stellar spaces.
+
+I doubted at the time as to the amount of information and 
+appreciation they brought to bear on their travels, so I took 
+occasion to draw one of the thin, unsmiling women into 
+conversation, asking her where they intended stopping next.
+
+"At Buda-Pesth," she answered.  I said in some amusement:
+
+"But that was Buda-Pesth we visited so carefully yesterday."
+
+"Oh, was it," she replied, without any visible change on her face, 
+"I thought we had not got there yet."  Apparently it was enough for 
+her to be travelling; the rest was of little importance.  Later in 
+the day, when asked if she had visited a certain old city in 
+Germany, she told me she had but would never go there again: "They 
+gave us such poor coffee at the hotel."  Again later in speaking to 
+her husband, who seemed a trifle vague as to whether he had seen 
+Nuremberg or not, she said:
+
+"Why, you remember it very well; it was there you bought those nice 
+overshoes!"
+
+All of which left me with some doubts in my mind as to the 
+cultivating influences of foreign travel on their minds.
+
+You cannot change a leopard's spots, neither can you alter the 
+nature of a race, and one of the strongest characteristics of the 
+Anglo-Saxon, is the nomadic instinct.  How often one hears people 
+say:
+
+"I am not going to sit at home and take care of my furniture.  I 
+want to see something of the world before I am too old."  Lately, a 
+sprightly maiden of uncertain years, just returned from a long trip 
+abroad, was asked if she intended now to settle down.
+
+"Settle down, indeed!  I'm a butterfly and I never expect to settle 
+down."
+
+There is certainly food here for reflection.  Why should we be more 
+inclined to wander than our neighbors?  Perhaps it is in a measure 
+due to our nervous, restless temperament, which is itself the 
+result of our climate; but whatever the cause is, inability to 
+remain long in one place is having a most unfortunate influence on 
+our social life.  When everyone is on the move or longing to be, it 
+becomes difficult to form any but the most superficial ties; strong 
+friendships become impossible, the most intimate family relations 
+are loosened.
+
+If one were of a speculative frame of mind and chose to take as the 
+basis for a calculation the increase in tourists between 1855, when 
+the ten pioneers started for Paris, and the number "personally 
+conducted" over land and sea today, and then glance forward at what 
+the future will be if this ratio of increase is maintained the 
+result would be something too awful for words.  For if ten have 
+become a million in forty years, what will be the total in 1955?  
+Nothing less than entire nations given over to sight-seeing, 
+passing their lives and incomes in rushing aimlessly about.
+
+If the facilities of communication increase as they undoubtedly 
+will with the demand, the prospect becomes nearer the idea of a 
+"Walpurgis Night" than anything else.  For the earth and the sea 
+will be covered and the air filled with every form of whirling, 
+flying, plunging device to get men quickly from one place to 
+another.
+
+Every human being on the globe will be flying South for the cold 
+months and North for the hot season.
+
+As personally conducted tours have been so satisfactory, agencies 
+will be started to lead us through all the stages of existence.  
+Parents will subscribe on the birth of their children to have them 
+personally conducted through life and everything explained as it is 
+done at present in the galleries abroad; food, lodging and reading 
+matter, husbands and wives will be provided by contract, to be 
+taken back and changed if unsatisfactory, as the big stores do with 
+their goods.  Delightful prospect!  Homes will become superfluous, 
+parents and children will only meet when their "tours" happen to 
+cross each other.  Our great-grandchildren will float through life 
+freed from every responsibility and more perfectly independent than 
+even that delightful dreamer, Bellamy, ventured to predict.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 29 - Husks
+
+
+AMONG the Protestants driven from France by that astute and 
+liberal-minded sovereign Louis XIV., were a colony of weavers, who 
+as all the world knows, settled at Spitalfields in England, where 
+their descendants weave silk to this day.
+
+On their arrival in Great Britain, before the looms could be set up 
+and a market found for their industry, the exiles were reduced to 
+the last extremity of destitution and hunger.  Looking about them 
+for anything that could be utilized for food, they discovered that 
+the owners of English slaughter-houses threw away as worthless, the 
+tails of the cattle they killed.  Like all the poor in France, 
+these wanderers were excellent cooks, and knew that at home such 
+caudal appendages were highly valued for the tenderness and flavor 
+of the meat.  To the amazement and disgust of the English villagers 
+the new arrivals proceeded to collect this "refuse" and carry it 
+home for food.  As the first principle of French culinary art is 
+the POT-AU-FEU, the tails were mostly converted into soup, on which 
+the exiles thrived and feasted.
+
+Their neighbors, envious at seeing the despised French indulging 
+daily in savory dishes, unknown to English palates, and tempted 
+like "Jack's" giant by the smell of "fresh meat," began to inquire 
+into the matter, and slowly realized how, in their ignorance, they 
+had been throwing away succulent and delicate food.  The news of 
+this discovery gradually spreading through all classes, "ox-tail" 
+became and has remained the national English soup.
+
+If this veracious tale could be twisted into a metaphor, it would 
+serve marvellously to illustrate the position of the entire Anglo-
+Saxon race, and especially that of their American descendants as 
+regards the Latin peoples.  For foolish prodigality and reckless, 
+ignorant extravagance, however, we leave our English cousins far 
+behind.
+
+Two American hotels come to my mind, as different in their 
+appearance and management as they are geographically asunder.  Both 
+are types and illustrations of the wilful waste that has recently 
+excited Mr. Ian Maclaren's comment, and the woeful want (of good 
+food) that is the result.  At one, a dreary shingle construction on 
+a treeless island, off our New England coast, where the ideas of 
+the landlord and his guests have remained as unchanged and 
+primitive as the island itself, I found on inquiry that all 
+articles of food coming from the first table were thrown into the 
+sea; and I have myself seen chickens hardly touched, rounds of 
+beef, trays of vegetables, and every variety of cake and dessert 
+tossed to the fish.
+
+While we were having soups so thin and tasteless that they would 
+have made a French house-wife blush, the ingredients essential to 
+an excellent "stock" were cast aside.  The boarders were paying 
+five dollars a day and appeared contented, the place was packed, 
+the landlord coining money, so it was foolish to expect any 
+improvement.
+
+The other hotel, a vast caravansary in the South, where a fortune 
+had been lavished in providing every modern convenience and luxury, 
+was the "fad" of its wealthy owner.  I had many talks with the 
+manager during my stay, and came to realize that most of the 
+wastefulness I saw around me was not his fault, but that of the 
+public, to whose taste he was obliged to cater.  At dinner, after 
+receiving your order, the waiter would disappear for half an hour, 
+and then bring your entire meal on one tray, the over-cooked meats 
+stranded in lakes of coagulated gravy, the entrees cold and the 
+ices warm.  He had generally forgotten two or three essentials, but 
+to send back for them meant to wait another half-hour, as his other 
+clients were clamoring to be served.  So you ate what was before 
+you in sulky disgust, and got out of the room as quickly as 
+possible.
+
+After one of these gastronomic races, being hungry, flustered, and 
+suffering from indigestion, I asked mine host if it had never 
+occurred to him to serve a TABLE D'HOTE dinner (in courses) as is 
+done abroad, where hundreds of people dine at the same moment, each 
+dish being offered them in turn accompanied by its accessories.
+
+"Of course, I have thought of it," he answered.  "It would be the 
+greatest improvement that could be introduced into American hotel-
+keeping.  No one knows better than I do how disastrous the present 
+system is to all parties.  Take as an example of the present way, 
+the dinner I am going to give you to-morrow, in honor of Christmas.  
+Glance over this MENU.  You will see that it enumerates every 
+costly and delicate article of food possible to procure and a long 
+list of other dishes, the greater part of which will not even be 
+called for.  As no number of CHEFS could possibly oversee the 
+proper preparation of such a variety of meats and sauces, all will 
+be carelessly cooked, and as you know by experience, poorly served.
+
+"People who exact useless variety," he added, "are sure in some way 
+to be the sufferers; in their anxiety to try everything, they will 
+get nothing worth eating.  Yet that meal will cost me considerably 
+more than my guests pay for their twenty-four hours' board and 
+lodging."
+
+"Why do it, you ask?  Because it is the custom, and because it will 
+be an advertisement.  These bills of fare will be sown broadcast 
+over the country in letters to friends and kept as souvenirs.  If, 
+instead of all this senseless superfluity, I were allowed to give a 
+TABLE D'HOTE meal to-morrow, with the CHEF I have, I could provide 
+an exquisite dinner, perfect in every detail, served at little 
+tables as deftly and silently as in a private house.  I could also 
+discharge half of my waiters, and charge two dollars a day instead 
+of five dollars, and the hotel would become (what it has never been 
+yet) a paying investment, so great would he the saving."
+
+"Only this morning," he continued, warming to his subject, "while 
+standing in the dining room, I saw a young man order and then send 
+away half the dishes on the MENU.  A chicken was broiled for him 
+and rejected; a steak and an omelette fared no better.  How much do 
+you suppose a hotel gains from a guest like that?"
+
+"The reason Americans put up with such poor viands in hotels is, 
+that home cooking in this country is so rudimentary, consisting 
+principally of fried dishes, and hot breads.  So little is known 
+about the proper preparation of food that tomorrow's dinner will 
+appear to many as the NE PLUS ULTRA of delicate living.  One of the 
+charms of a hotel for people who live poorly at home, lies in this 
+power to order expensive dishes they rarely or never see on their 
+own tables."
+
+"To be served with a quantity of food that he has but little desire 
+to eat is one of an American citizen's dearest privileges, and a 
+right he will most unwillingly relinquish.  He may know as well as 
+you and I do, that what he calls for will not be worth eating; that 
+is of secondary importance, he has it before him, and is 
+contented."
+
+"The hotel that attempted limiting the liberty of its guests to the 
+extent of serving them a TABLE D'HOTE dinner, would be emptied in a 
+week."
+
+"A crowning incongruity, as most people are delighted to dine with 
+friends, or at public functions, where the meal is invariably 
+served A LA RUSSE (another name for a TABLE D'HOTE), and on these 
+occasions are only too glad to have their MENU chosen for them.  
+The present way, however, is a remnant of 'old times' and the 
+average American, with all his love of change and novelty, is very 
+conservative when it comes to his table."
+
+What this manager did not confide to me, but what I discovered 
+later for myself, was that to facilitate the service, and avoid 
+confusion in the kitchens, it had become the custom at all the 
+large and most of the small hotels in this country, to carve the 
+joints, cut up the game, and portion out vegetables, an hour or two 
+before meal time.  The food, thus arranged, is placed in vast steam 
+closets, where it simmers gayly for hours, in its own, and fifty 
+other vapors.
+
+Any one who knows the rudiments of cookery, will recognize that 
+with this system no viand can have any particular flavor, the 
+partridges having a taste of their neighbor the roast beef, which 
+in turn suggests the plum pudding it has been "chumming" with.
+
+It is not alone in a hotel that we miss the good in grasping after 
+the better.  Small housekeeping is apparently run on the same 
+lines.
+
+A young Frenchman, who was working in my rooms, told me in reply to 
+a question regarding prices, that every kind of food was cheaper 
+here than abroad, but the prejudice against certain dishes was so 
+strong in this country that many of the best things in the markets 
+were never called for.  Our nation is no longer in its "teens" and 
+should cease to act like a foolish boy who has inherited (what 
+appears to him) a limitless fortune; not for fear of his coming, 
+like his prototype in the parable, to live on "husks" for he is 
+doing that already, but lest like the dog of the fable, in grasping 
+after the shadow of a banquet he miss the simple meal that is 
+within his reach.
+
+One of the reasons for this deplorable state of affairs lies in the 
+foolish education our girls receive.  They learn so little 
+housekeeping at home, that when married they are obliged to begin 
+all over again, unless they prefer, like a majority of their 
+friends, to let things as go at the will and discretion of the 
+"lady" below stairs.
+
+At both hotels I have referred to, the families of the men 
+interested considered it beneath them to know what was taking 
+place.  The "daughter" of the New England house went semi-weekly to 
+Boston to take violin lessons at ten dollars each, although she had 
+no intention of becoming a professional, while the wife wrote 
+poetry and ignored the hotel side of her life entirely.
+
+The "better half" of the Florida establishment hired a palace in 
+Rome and entertained ambassadors.  Hotels divided against 
+themselves are apt to be establishments where you pay for riotous 
+living and are served only with husks.
+
+We have many hard lessons ahead of us, and one of the hardest will 
+be for our nation to learn humbly from the thrifty emigrants on our 
+shores, the great art of utilizing the "tails" that are at this 
+moment being so recklessly thrown away.
+
+As it is, in spite of markets overflowing with every fish, 
+vegetable, and tempting viand, we continue to be the worst fed, 
+most meagrely nourished of all the wealthy nations on the face of 
+the earth.  We have a saying (for an excellent reason unknown on 
+the Continent) that Providence provides us with food and the devil 
+sends the cooks!  It would be truer to say that the poorer the food 
+resources of a nation, the more restricted the choice of material, 
+the better the cooks; a small latitude when providing for the table 
+forcing them to a hundred clever combinations and mysterious 
+devices to vary the monotony of their cuisine and tempt a palate, 
+by custom staled.
+
+Our heedless people, with great variety at their disposition, are 
+unequal to the situation, wasting and discarding the best, and 
+making absolutely nothing of their advantages.
+
+If we were enjoying our prodigality by living on the fat of the 
+land, there would be less reason to reproach ourselves, for every 
+one has a right to live as he pleases.  But as it is, our foolish 
+prodigals are spending their substance, while eating the husks!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 30 - The Faubourg of St. Germain
+
+
+THERE has been too much said and written in the last dozen years 
+about breaking down the "great wall" behind which the aristocrats 
+of the famous Faubourg, like the Celestials, their prototypes, have 
+ensconced themselves.  The Chinese speak of outsiders as 
+"barbarians."  The French ladies refer to such unfortunates as 
+being "beyond the pale."  Almost all that has been written is 
+arrant nonsense; that imaginary barrier exists to-day on as firm a 
+foundation, and is guarded by sentinels as vigilant as when, forty 
+years ago, Napoleon (third of the name) and his Spanish spouse 
+mounted to its assault.
+
+Their repulse was a bitter humiliation to the PARVENUE Empress, 
+whose resentment took the form (along with many other curious 
+results) of opening the present Boulevard St. Germain, its line 
+being intentionally carried through the heart of that quarter, 
+teeming with historic "Hotels" of the old aristocracy, where 
+beautiful constructions were mercilessly torn down to make way for 
+the new avenue.  The cajoleries which Eugenie first tried and the 
+blows that followed were alike unavailing.  Even her worship of 
+Marie Antoinette, between whom and herself she found imaginary 
+resemblances, failed to warm the stony hearts of the proud old 
+ladies, to whom it was as gall and wormwood to see a nobody crowned 
+in the palace of their kings.  Like religious communities, 
+persecution only drew this old society more firmly together and 
+made them stand by each other in their distress.  When the Bois was 
+remodelled by Napoleon and the lake with its winding drive laid 
+out, the new Court drove of an afternoon along this water front.  
+That was enough for the old swells!  They retired to the remote 
+"Allee of the Acacias," and solemnly took their airing away from 
+the bustle of the new world, incidentally setting a fashion that 
+has held good to this day; the lakeside being now deserted, and the 
+"Acacias" crowded of an afternoon, by all that Paris holds of 
+elegant and inelegant.
+
+Where the brilliant Second Empire failed, the Republic had little 
+chance of success.  With each succeeding year the "Old Faubourg" 
+withdrew more and more into its shell, going so far, after the fall 
+of Mac Mahon, as to change its "season" to the spring, so that the 
+balls and FETES it gave should not coincide with the "official" 
+entertainments during the winter.
+
+The next people to have a "shy" at the "Old Faubourg's" Gothic 
+battlements were the Jews, who were victorious in a few light 
+skirmishes and succeeded in capturing one or two illustrious 
+husbands for their daughters.  The wily Israelites, however, 
+discovered that titled sons-in-law were expensive articles and 
+often turned out unsatisfactorily, so they quickly desisted.  The 
+English, the most practical of societies, have always left the 
+Faubourg alone.  It has been reserved for our countrywomen to lay 
+the most determined siege yet recorded to that untaken stronghold.
+
+It is a characteristic of the American temperament to be unable to 
+see a closed door without developing an intense curiosity to know 
+what is behind; or to read "No Admittance to the Public" over an 
+entrance without immediately determining to get inside at any 
+price.  So it is easy to understand the attraction an hermetically 
+sealed society would have for our fair compatriots.  Year after 
+year they have flung themselves against its closed gateways.  
+Repulsed, they have retired only to form again for the attack, but 
+are as far away to-day from planting their flag in that citadel as 
+when they first began.  It does not matter to them what is inside; 
+there may be (as in this case) only mouldy old halls and a group of 
+people with antiquated ideas and ways.  It is enough for a certain 
+type of woman to know that she is not wanted in an exclusive 
+circle, to be ready to die in the attempt to get there.  This point 
+of view reminds one of Mrs. Snob's saying about a new arrival at a 
+hotel: "I am sure she must be 'somebody' for she was so rude to me 
+when I spoke to her;" and her answer to her daughter when the girl 
+said (on arriving at a watering-place) that she had noticed a very 
+nice family "who look as if they wanted to know us, Mamma:"
+
+"Then, my dear," replied Mamma Snob, "they certainly are not people 
+we want to meet!"
+
+The men in French society are willing enough to make acquaintance 
+with foreigners.  You may see the youth of the Faubourg dancing at 
+American balls in Paris, or running over for occasional visits to 
+this country.  But when it comes to taking their women-kind with 
+them, it is a different matter.  Americans who have known well-born 
+Frenchmen at school or college are surprised, on meeting them 
+later, to be asked (cordially enough) to dine EN GARCON at a 
+restaurant, although their Parisian friend is married.  An 
+Englishman's or American's first word would be on a like occasion:
+
+"Come and dine with me to-night.  I want to introduce you to my 
+wife."  Such an idea would never cross a Frenchman's mind!
+
+One American I know is a striking example of this.  He was born in 
+Paris, went to school and college there, and has lived in that city 
+all his life.  His sister married a French nobleman.  Yet at this 
+moment, in spite of his wealth, his charming American wife, and 
+many beautiful entertainments, he has not one warm French friend, 
+or the ENTREE on a footing of intimacy to a single Gallic house.
+
+There is no analogy between the English aristocracy and the French 
+nobility, except that they are both antiquated institutions; the 
+English is the more harmful on account of its legislative power, 
+the French is the more pretentious.  The House of Lords is the most 
+open club in London, the payment of an entrance-fee in the shape of 
+a check to a party fund being an all-sufficient sesame.  In France, 
+one must be born in the magic circle.  The spirit of the Emigration 
+of 1793 is not yet extinct.  The nobles live in their own world 
+(how expressive the word is, seeming to exclude all the rest of 
+mankind), pining after an impossible RESTAURATION, alien to the 
+present day, holding aloof from politics for fear of coming in 
+touch with the masses, with whom they pride themselves on having 
+nothing in common.
+
+What leads many people astray on this subject is that there has 
+formed around this ancient society a circle composed of rich 
+"outsiders," who have married into good families; and of eccentric 
+members of the latter, who from a love of excitement or for 
+interested motives have broken away from their traditions.  Newly 
+arrived Americans are apt to mistake this "world" for the real 
+thing.  Into this circle it is not difficult for foreigners who are 
+rich and anxious to see something of life to gain admission.  To be 
+received by the ladies of this outer circle, seems to our 
+compatriots to be an achievement, until they learn the real 
+standing of their new acquaintances.
+
+No gayer houses, however, exist than those of the new set.  At 
+their city or country houses, they entertain continually, and they 
+are the people one meets toward five o'clock, on the grounds of the 
+Polo Club, in the Bois, at FETES given by the Island Club of 
+Puteaux, attending the race meetings, or dining at American houses.  
+As far as amusement and fun go, one might seek much further and 
+fare worse.
+
+It is very, very rare that foreigners get beyond this circle.  
+Occasionally there is a marriage between an American girl and some 
+Frenchman of high rank.  In these cases the girl is, as it were, 
+swallowed up.  Her family see little of her, she rarely appears in 
+general society, and, little by little, she is lost to her old 
+friends and relations.  I know of several cases of this kind where 
+it is to be doubted if a dozen Americans outside of the girls' 
+connections know that such women exist.  The fall in rents and land 
+values has made the French aristocracy poor; it is only by the 
+greatest economy (and it never entered into an American mind to 
+conceive of such economy as is practised among them) that they 
+succeed in holding on to their historical chateaux or beautiful 
+city residences; so that pride plays a large part in the isolation 
+in which they live.
+
+The fact that no titles are recognized officially by the French 
+government (the most they can obtain being a "courtesy" 
+recognition) has placed these people in a singularly false 
+position.  An American girl who has married a Duke is a good deal 
+astonished to find that she is legally only plain "Madame So and 
+So;" that when her husband does his military service there is no 
+trace of the high-sounding title to be found in his official 
+papers.  Some years ago, a colonel was rebuked because he allowed 
+the Duc d'Alencon to be addressed as "Monseigneur" by the other 
+officers of his regiment.  This ought to make ambitious papas 
+reflect, when they treat themselves to titled sons-in-law.  They 
+should at least try and get an article recognized by the law.
+
+Most of what is written here is perfectly well known to resident 
+Americans in Paris, and has been the cause of gradually splitting 
+that once harmonious settlement into two perfectly distinct camps, 
+between which no love is lost.  The members of one, clinging to 
+their countrymen's creed of having the best or nothing, have been 
+contented to live in France and know but few French people, 
+entertaining among themselves and marrying their daughters to 
+Americans.  The members of the other, who have "gone in" for French 
+society, take what they can get, and, on the whole, lead very jolly 
+lives.  It often happens (perhaps it is only a coincidence) that 
+ladies who have not been very successful at home are partial to 
+this circle, where they easily find guests for their entertainments 
+and the recognition their souls long for.
+
+What the future of the "Great Faubourg" will be, it is hard to say.  
+All hope of a possible RESTAURATION appears to be lost.  Will the 
+proud necks that refused to bend to the Orleans dynasty or the two 
+"empires" bow themselves to the republican yoke?  It would seem as 
+if it must terminate in this way, for everything in this world must 
+finish.  But the end is not yet; one cannot help feeling sympathy 
+for people who are trying to live up to their traditions and be 
+true to such immaterial idols as "honor" and "family" in this 
+discouragingly material age, when everything goes down before the 
+Golden Calf.  Nor does one wonder that men who can trace their 
+ancestors back to the Crusades should hesitate to ally themselves 
+with the last rich PARVENU who has raised himself from the gutter, 
+or resent the ardor with which the latest importation of American 
+ambition tries to chum with them and push its way into their life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 31 - Men's Manners
+
+
+NOTHING makes one feel so old as to wake up suddenly, as it were, 
+and realize that the conditions of life have changed, and that the 
+standards you knew and accepted in your youth have been raised or 
+lowered.  The young men you meet have somehow become uncomfortably 
+polite, offering you armchairs in the club, and listening with a 
+shade of deference to your stories.  They are of another 
+generation; their ways are not your ways, nor their ambitions those 
+you had in younger days.  One is tempted to look a little closer, 
+to analyze what the change is, in what this subtle difference 
+consists, which you feel between your past and their present.  You 
+are surprised and a little angry to discover that, among other 
+things, young men have better manners than were general among the 
+youths of fifteen years ago.
+
+Anyone over forty can remember three epochs in men's manners.  When 
+I was a very young man, there were still going about in society a 
+number of gentlemen belonging to what was reverently called the 
+"old school," who had evidently taken Sir Charles Grandison as 
+their model, read Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son with 
+attention, and been brought up to commence letters to their 
+fathers, "Honored Parent," signing themselves "Your humble servant 
+and respectful son."  There are a few such old gentlemen still to 
+be found in the more conservative clubs, where certain windows are 
+tacitly abandoned to these elegant-mannered fossils.  They are 
+quite harmless unless you happen to find them in a reminiscent 
+mood, when they are apt to be a little tiresome; it takes their 
+rusty mental machinery so long to get working!  Washington 
+possesses a particularly fine collection among the retired army and 
+navy officers and ex-officials.  It is a fact well known that no 
+one drawing a pension ever dies.
+
+About 1875, a new generation with new manners began to make its 
+appearance.  A number of its members had been educated at English 
+universities, and came home burning to upset old ways and teach 
+their elders how to live.  They broke away from the old clubs and 
+started smaller and more exclusive circles among themselves, 
+principally in the country.  This was a period of bad manners.  
+True to their English model, they considered it "good form" to be 
+uncivil and to make no effort towards the general entertainment 
+when in society.  Not to speak more than a word or two during a 
+dinner party to either of one's neighbors was the supreme CHIC.  As 
+a revolt from the twice-told tales of their elders they held it to 
+be "bad form" to tell a story, no matter how fresh and amusing it 
+might be.  An unfortunate outsider who ventured to tell one in 
+their club was crushed by having his tale received in dead silence.  
+When it was finished one of the party would "ring the bell," and 
+the circle order drinks at the expense of the man who had dared to 
+amuse them.  How the professional story-teller must have shuddered 
+- he whose story never was ripe until it had been told a couple of 
+hundred times, and who would produce a certain tale at a certain 
+course as surely as clock-work.
+
+That the story-telling type was a bore, I grant.  To be grabbed on 
+entering your club and obliged to listen to Smith's last, or to 
+have the conversation after dinner monopolized by Jones and his 
+eternal "Speaking of coffee, I remember once," etc. added an 
+additional hardship to existence.  But the opposite pose, which 
+became the fashion among the reformers, was hardly less wearisome.  
+To sit among a group of perfectly mute men, with an occasional word 
+dropping into the silence like a stone in a well, was surely little 
+better.
+
+A girl told me she had once sat through an entire cotillion with a 
+youth whose only remark during the evening had been (after absorbed 
+contemplation of the articles in question), "How do you like my 
+socks?"
+
+On another occasion my neighbor at table said to me:
+
+"I think the man on my right has gone to sleep.  He is sitting with 
+his eyes closed!"  She was mistaken.  He was practising his newly 
+acquired "repose of manner," and living up to the standard of his 
+set.
+
+The model young man of that period had another offensive habit, his 
+pose of never seeing you, which got on the nerves of his elders to 
+a considerable extent.  If he came into a drawing-room where you 
+were sitting with a lady, he would shake hands with her and begin a 
+conversation, ignoring your existence, although you may have been 
+his guest at dinner the night before, or he yours.  This was also a 
+tenet of his creed borrowed from trans-Atlantic cousins, who, by 
+the bye, during the time I speak of, found America, and especially 
+our Eastern states, a happy hunting-ground, - all the clubs, 
+country houses, and society generally opening their doors to the 
+"sesame" of English nationality.  It took our innocent youths a 
+good ten years to discover that there was no reciprocity in the 
+arrangement; it was only in the next epoch (the list of the three 
+referred to) that our men recovered their self-respect, and assumed 
+towards foreigners in general the attitude of polite indifference 
+which is their manner to us when abroad.  Nothing could have been 
+more provincial and narrow than the ideas of our "smart" men at 
+that time.  They congregated in little cliques, huddling together 
+in public, and cracking personal old jokes; but were speechless 
+with MAUVAISE HONTE if thrown among foreigners or into other 
+circles of society.  All this is not to be wondered at considering 
+the amount of their general education and reading.  One charming 
+little custom then greatly in vogue among our JEUNESSE DOREE was to 
+remain at a ball, after the other guests had retired, tipsy, and 
+then break anything that came to hand.  It was so amusing to throw 
+china, glass, or valuable plants, out of the windows, to strip to 
+the waist and box or bait the tired waiters.
+
+I look at the boys growing up around me with sincere admiration, 
+they are so superior to their predecessors in breeding, in 
+civility, in deference to older people, and in a thousand other 
+little ways that mark high-bred men.  The stray Englishman, of no 
+particular standing at home no longer finds our men eager to 
+entertain him, to put their best "hunter" at his disposition, to 
+board, lodge, and feed him indefinitely, or make him honorary 
+member of all their clubs.  It is a constant source of pleasure to 
+me to watch this younger generation, so plainly do I see in them 
+the influence of their mothers - women I knew as girls, and who 
+were so far ahead of their brothers and husbands in refinement and 
+culture.  To have seen these girls marry and bring up their sons so 
+well has been a satisfaction and a compensation for many 
+disillusions.  Woman's influence will always remain the strongest 
+lever that can be brought to bear in raising the tone of a family; 
+it is impossible not to see about these young men a reflection of 
+what we found so charming in their mothers.  One despairs at times 
+of humanity, seeing vulgarity and snobbishness riding triumphantly 
+upward; but where the tone of the younger generation is as high as 
+I have lately found it, there is still much hope for the future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 32 - An Ideal Hostess
+
+
+THE saying that "One-half of the world ignores how the other half 
+lives" received for me an additional confirmation this last week, 
+when I had the good fortune to meet again an old friend, now for 
+some years retired from the stage, where she had by her charm and 
+beauty, as well as by her singing, held all the Parisian world at 
+her pretty feet.
+
+Our meeting was followed on her part by an invitation to take 
+luncheon with her the next day, "to meet a few friends, and talk 
+over old times."  So half-past twelve (the invariable hour for the 
+"second breakfast," in France) the following day found me entering 
+a shady drawing-room, where a few people were sitting in the cool 
+half-light that strayed across from a canvas-covered balcony 
+furnished with plants and low chairs.  Beyond one caught a glimpse 
+of perhaps the gayest picture that the bright city of Paris offers, 
+- the sweep of the Boulevard as it turns to the Rue Royale, the 
+flower market, gay with a thousand colors in the summer sunshine, 
+while above all the color and movement, rose, cool and gray, the 
+splendid colonnade of the Madeleine.  The rattle of carriages, the 
+roll of the heavy omnibuses and the shrill cries from the street 
+below floated up, softened into a harmonious murmur that in no way 
+interfered with our conversation, and is sweeter than the finest 
+music to those who love their Paris.
+
+Five or six rooms EN SUITE opening on the street, and as many more 
+on a large court, formed the apartment, where everything betrayed 
+the ARTISTE and the singer.  The walls, hung with silk or tapestry, 
+held a collection of original drawings and paintings, a fortune in 
+themselves; the dozen portraits of our hostess in favorite roles 
+were by men great in the art world; a couple of pianos covered with 
+well-worn music and numberless photographs signed with names that 
+would have made an autograph-fiend's mouth water.
+
+After a gracious, cooing welcome, more whispered than spoken, I was 
+presented to the guests I did not know.  Before this ceremony was 
+well over, two maids in black, with white caps, opened a door into 
+the dining-room and announced luncheon.  As this is written on the 
+theme that "people know too little how their neighbors live," I 
+give the MENU.  It may amuse my readers and serve, perhaps, as a 
+little object lesson to those at home who imagine that quantity and 
+not quality is of importance.
+
+Our gracious hostess had earned a fortune in her profession (and I 
+am told that two CHEFS preside over her simple meals); so it was 
+not a spirit of economy which dictated this simplicity.  At first, 
+HORS D'OEUVRES were served, - all sorts of tempting little things, 
+- very thin slices of ham, spiced sausages, olives and caviar, and 
+eaten - not merely passed and refused.  Then came the one hot dish 
+of the meal.  "One!"  I think I hear my reader exclaim.  Yes, my 
+friend, but that one was a marvel in its way.  Chicken A 
+L'ESPAGNOLE, boiled, and buried in rice and tomatoes cooked whole - 
+a dish to be dreamed of and remembered in one's prayers and 
+thanksgivings!  After at least two helpings each to this CHEF-
+D'OEUVRE, cold larded fillet and a meat pate were served with the 
+salad.  Then a bit of cheese, a beaten cream of chocolate, fruit, 
+and bon-bons.  For a drink we had the white wine from which 
+champagne is made (by a chemical process and the addition of many 
+injurious ingredients); in other words, a pure BRUT champagne with 
+just a suggestion of sparkle at the bottom of your glass.  All the 
+party then migrated together into the smoking-room for cigarettes, 
+coffee, and a tiny glass of LIQUEUR.
+
+These details have been given at length, not only because the meal 
+seemed to me, while I was eating it, to be worthy of whole columns 
+of print, but because one of the besetting sins of our dear land is 
+to serve a profusion of food no one wants and which the hostess 
+would never have dreamed of ordering had she been alone.
+
+Nothing is more wearisome than to sit at table and see course after 
+course, good, bad, and indifferent, served, after you have eaten 
+what you want.  And nothing is more vulgar than to serve them; for 
+either a guest refuses a great deal of the food and appears 
+uncivil, or he must eat, and regret it afterwards.  If we ask 
+people to a meal, it should be to such as we eat, as a general 
+thing, ourselves, and such as they would have at home.  Otherwise 
+it becomes ostentation and vulgarity.  Why should one be expelled 
+to eat more than usual because a friend has been nice enough to ask 
+one to take one's dinner with him, instead of eating it alone?  It 
+is the being among friends that tempts, not the food; the fact at 
+skilful waiters have been able to serve a dozen varieties of fish, 
+flesh, and fowl during the time you were at table has added little 
+to any one's pleasure.  On the contrary!  Half the time one eats 
+from pure absence of mind, a number of most injurious mixtures and 
+so prepares an awful to-morrow and the foundation of many 
+complicated diseases.
+
+I see Smith and Jones daily at the club, where we dine cheerfully 
+together on soup, a cut of the joint, a dessert, and drink a pint 
+of claret.  But if either Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Jones asks me to 
+dinner, we have eight courses and half as many wines, and Smith 
+will say quite gravely to me, "Try this '75 'Perrier Jouet'," as if 
+he were in the habit of drinking it daily.  It makes me smile, for 
+he would as soon think of ordering a bottle of that wine at the 
+club as he would think of ordering a flask of nectar.
+
+But to return to our "mutton."  As we had none of us eaten too much 
+(and so become digesting machines), we were cheerful and sprightly.  
+A little music followed and an author repeated some of his poetry.  
+I noticed that during the hour before we broke up our hostess 
+contrived to have a little talk with each of her guests, which she 
+made quite personal, appearing for the moment as though the rest of 
+the world did not exist for her, than which there is no more subtle 
+flattery, and which is the act of a well-bred and appreciative 
+woman.  Guests cannot be treated EN MASSE any more than food; to 
+ask a man to your house is not enough.  He should be made to feel, 
+if you wish him to go away with a pleasant remembrance of the 
+entertainment, that his presence has in some way added to it and 
+been a personal pleasure to his host.
+
+A good soul that all New York knew a few years ago, whose 
+entertainments were as though the street had been turned into a 
+SALON for the moment, used to go about among her guests saying, 
+"There have been one hundred and seventy-five people here this 
+Thursday, ten more than last week," with such a satisfied smile, 
+that you felt that she had little left to wish for, and found 
+yourself wondering just which number you represented in her mind.  
+When you entered she must have murmured a numeral to herself as she 
+shook your hand.
+
+There is more than one house in New York where I have grave doubts 
+if the host and hostess are quite sure of my name when I dine 
+there; after an abstracted welcome, they rarely put themselves out 
+to entertain their guests.  Black coats and evening dresses 
+alternate in pleasing perspective down the long line of their 
+table.  Their gold plate is out, and the CHEF has been allowed to 
+work his own sweet will, so they give themselves no further 
+trouble.
+
+Why does not some one suggest to these amphitrions to send fifteen 
+dollars in prettily monogrammed envelopes to each of their friends, 
+requesting them to expend it on a dinner.  The compliment would be 
+quite as personal, and then the guests might make up little parties 
+to suit themselves, which would be much more satisfactory than 
+going "in" with some one chosen at hazard from their host's 
+visiting list, and less fatiguing to that gentleman and his family.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 33 - The Introducer
+
+
+WE all suffer more or less from the perennial "freshness" of 
+certain acquaintances - tiresome people whom a misguided Providence 
+has endowed with over-flowing vitality and an irrepressible love of 
+their fellowmen, and who, not content with looking on life as a 
+continual "spree," insist on making others happy in spite of 
+themselves.  Their name is legion and their presence ubiquitous, 
+but they rarely annoy as much as when disguised under the mask of 
+the "Introducer."  In his clutches one is helpless.  It is 
+impossible to escape from such philanthropic tyranny.  He, in his 
+freshness, imagines that to present human beings to each other is 
+his mission in this world and moves through life making these 
+platonic unions, oblivious, as are other match-makers, of the 
+misery he creates.
+
+If you are out for a quiet stroll, one of these genial gentlemen is 
+sure to come bounding up, and without notice or warning present you 
+to his "friend," - the greater part of the time a man he has met 
+only an hour before, but whom he endows out of the warehouse of his 
+generous imagination with several talents and all the virtues.  In 
+order to make the situation just one shade more uncomfortable, this 
+kindly bore proceeds to sing a hymn of praise concerning both of 
+you to your faces, adding, in order that you may both feel quite 
+friendly and pleasant:
+
+"I know you two will fancy each other, you are so alike," - a 
+phrase neatly calculated to nip any conversation in the bud.  You 
+detest the unoffending stranger on the spot and would like to kill 
+the bore.  Not to appear an absolute brute you struggle through 
+some commonplace phrases, discovering the while that your new 
+acquaintance is no more anxious to know you, than you are to meet 
+him; that he has not the slightest idea who you are, neither does 
+he desire to find out.  He classes you with the bore, and his one 
+idea, like your own, is to escape.  So that the only result of the 
+Introducer's good-natured interference has been to make two fellow-
+creatures miserable.
+
+A friend was telling me the other day of the martyrdom he had 
+suffered from this class.  He spoke with much feeling, as he is the 
+soul of amiability, but somewhat short-sighted and afflicted with a 
+hopelessly bad memory for faces.  For the last few years, he has 
+been in the habit of spending one or two of the winter months in 
+Washington, where his friends put him up at one club or another.  
+Each winter on his first appearance at one of these clubs, some 
+kindly disposed old fogy is sure to present him to a circle of the 
+members, and he finds himself indiscriminately shaking hands with 
+Judges and Colonels.  As little or no conversation follows these 
+introductions to fix the individuality of the members in his mind, 
+he unconsciously cuts two-thirds of his newly acquired circle the 
+next afternoon, and the following winter, after a ten-months' 
+absence, he innocently ignores the other third.  So hopelessly has 
+he offended in this way, that last season, on being presented to a 
+club member, the latter peevishly blurted out:
+
+"This is the fourth time I have been introduced to Mr. Blank, but 
+he never remembers me," and glared coldly at him, laying it all 
+down to my friend's snobbishness and to the airs of a New Yorker 
+when away from home.  If instead of being sacrificed to the 
+introducer's mistaken zeal my poor friend had been left quietly to 
+himself, he would in good time have met the people congenial to him 
+and avoided giving offence to a number of kindly gentlemen.
+
+This introducing mania takes an even more aggressive form in the 
+hostess, who imagines that she is lacking in hospitality if any two 
+people in her drawing-room are not made known to each other.  No 
+matter how interested you may be in a chat with a friend, you will 
+see her bearing down upon you, bringing in tow the one human being 
+you have carefully avoided for years.  Escape seems impossible, but 
+as a forlorn hope you fling yourself into conversation with your 
+nearest neighbor, trying by your absorbed manner to ward off the 
+calamity.  In vain!  With a tap on your elbow your smiling hostess 
+introduces you and, having spoiled your afternoon, flits off in 
+search of other prey.
+
+The question of introductions is one on which it is impossible to 
+lay down any fixed rules.  There must constantly occur situations 
+where one's acts must depend upon a kindly consideration for other 
+people's feelings, which after all, is only another name for tact.  
+Nothing so plainly shows the breeding of a man or woman as skill in 
+solving problems of this kind without giving offence.
+
+Foreigners, with their greater knowledge of the world, rarely fall 
+into the error of indiscriminate introducing, appreciating what a 
+presentation means and what obligations it entails.  The English 
+fall into exactly the contrary error from ours, and carry it to 
+absurd lengths.  Starting with the assumption that everybody knows 
+everybody, and being aware of the general dread of meeting 
+"detrimentals," they avoid the difficulty by making no 
+introductions.  This may work well among themselves, but it is 
+trying to a stranger whom they have been good enough to ask to 
+their tables, to sit out the meal between two people who ignore his 
+presence and converse across him; for an Englishman will expire 
+sooner than speak to a person to whom he has not been introduced.
+
+The French, with the marvellous tact that has for centuries made 
+them the law-givers on all subjects of etiquette and breeding, have 
+another way of avoiding useless introductions.  They assume that 
+two people meeting in a drawing-room belong to the same world and 
+so chat pleasantly with those around them.  On leaving the SALON 
+the acquaintance is supposed to end, and a gentleman who should at 
+another time or place bow or speak to the lady who had offered him 
+a cup of tea and talked pleasantly to him over it at a friend's 
+reception, would commit a gross breach of etiquette.
+
+I was once present at a large dinner given in Cologne to the 
+American Geographical Society.  No sooner was I seated than my two 
+neighbors turned towards me mentioning their names and waiting for 
+me to do the same.  After that the conversation flowed on as among 
+friends.  This custom struck me as exceedingly well-bred and 
+calculated to make a foreigner feel at his ease.
+
+Among other curious types, there are people so constituted that 
+they are unhappy if a single person can be found in the room to 
+whom they have not been introduced.  It does not matter who the 
+stranger may be or what chance there is of finding him congenial.  
+They must be presented; nothing else will content them.  If you are 
+chatting with a friend you feel a pull at your sleeve, and in an 
+audible aside, they ask for an introduction.  The aspirant will 
+then bring up and present the members of his family who happen to 
+be near.  After that he seems to be at ease, and having absolutely 
+nothing to say will soon drift off.  Our public men suffer terribly 
+from promiscuous introductions; it is a part of a political career; 
+a good memory for names and faces and a cordial manner under fire 
+have often gone a long way in floating a statesman on to success.
+
+Demand, we are told, creates supply.  During a short stay in a 
+Florida hotel last winter, I noticed a curious little man who 
+looked like a cross between a waiter and a musician.  As he spoke 
+to me several times and seemed very officious, I asked who he was.  
+The answer was so grotesque that I could not believe my ears.  I 
+was told that he held the position of official "introducer," or 
+master of ceremonies, and that the guests under his guidance became 
+known to each other, danced, rode, and married to their own and 
+doubtless to his satisfaction.  The further west one goes the more 
+pronounced this mania becomes.  Everybody is introduced to 
+everybody on all imaginable occasions.  If a man asks you to take a 
+drink, he presents you to the bar-tender.  If he takes you for a 
+drive, the cab-driver is introduced.  "Boots" makes you acquainted 
+with the chambermaid, and the hotel proprietor unites you in the 
+bonds of friendship with the clerk at the desk.  Intercourse with 
+one's fellows becomes one long debauch of introduction.  In this 
+country where every liberty is respected, it is a curious fact that 
+we should be denied the most important of all rights, that of 
+choosing our acquaintances.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 34 - A Question and an Answer
+
+
+DEAR IDLER:
+
+I HAVE been reading your articles in The Evening Post.  They are 
+really most amusing!  You do know such a lot about people and 
+things, that I am tempted to write and ask you a question on a 
+subject that is puzzling me.  What is it that is necessary to 
+succeed - socially?  There!  It is out!  Please do not laugh at me.  
+Such funny people get on and such clever, agreeable ones fail, that 
+I am all at sea.  Now do be nice and answer me, and you will have a 
+very grateful
+
+ADMIRER.
+
+
+The above note, in a rather juvenile feminine hand, and breathing a 
+faint perfume of VIOLETTE DE PARME, was part of the morning's mail 
+that I found lying on my desk a few days ago, in delightful 
+contrast to the bills and advertisements which formed the bulk of 
+my correspondence.  It would suppose a stoicism greater than I 
+possess, not to have felt a thrill of satisfaction in its perusal.  
+There was, then, some one who read with pleasure what I wrote, and 
+who had been moved to consult me on a question (evidently to her) 
+of importance.  I instantly decided to do my best for the 
+edification of my fair correspondent (for no doubt entered my head 
+that she was both young and fair), the more readily because that 
+very question had frequently presented itself to my own mind on 
+observing the very capricious choice of Dame "Fashion" in the 
+distribution of her favors.
+
+That there are people who succeed brilliantly and move from success 
+to success, amid an applauding crowd of friends and admirers, while 
+others, apparently their superiors in every way, are distanced in 
+the race, is an undeniable fact.  You have but to glance around the 
+circle of your acquaintances and relations to be convinced of this 
+anomaly.  To a reflecting mind the question immediately presents 
+itself, Why is this?  General society is certainly cultivated 
+enough to appreciate intelligence and superior endowments.  How 
+then does it happen that the social favorites are so often lacking 
+in the qualities which at a first glance would seem indispensable 
+to success?
+
+Before going any further let us stop a moment, and look at the 
+subject from another side, for it is more serious than appears to 
+be on the surface.  To be loved by those around us, to stand well 
+in the world, is certainly the most legitimate as well as the most 
+common of ambitions, as well as the incentive to most of the 
+industry and perseverance in life.  Aside from science, which is 
+sometimes followed for itself alone, and virtue, which we are told 
+looks for no other reward, the hope which inspires a great deal of 
+the persistent efforts we see, is generally that of raising one's 
+self and those one loves by one's efforts into a sphere higher than 
+where cruel fate had placed them; that they, too, may take their 
+place in the sunshine and enjoy the good things of life.  This 
+ambition is often purely disinterested; a life of hardest toil is 
+cheerfully borne, with the hope (for sole consolation) that dear 
+ones will profit later by all the work, and live in a circle the 
+patient toiler never dreams of entering.  Surely he is a stern 
+moralist who would deny this satisfaction to the breadwinner of a 
+family.
+
+There are doubtless many higher motives in life, more elevated 
+goals toward which struggling humanity should strive.  If you 
+examine the average mind, however, you will be pretty sure to find 
+that success is the touchstone by which we judge our fellows and 
+what, in our hearts, we admire the most.  That is not to be 
+wondered at, either, for we have done all we can to implant it 
+there.  From a child's first opening thought, it is impressed upon 
+him that the great object of existence is to succeed.  Did a parent 
+ever tell a child to try and stand last in his class?  And yet 
+humility is a virtue we admire in the abstract.  Are any of us 
+willing to step aside and see our inferiors pass us in the race?  
+That is too much to ask of poor humanity.  Were other and higher 
+standards to be accepted, the structure of civilization as it 
+exists to-day would crumble away and the great machine run down.
+
+In returning to my correspondent and her perfectly legitimate 
+desire to know the road to success, we must realize that to a large 
+part of the world social success is the only kind they understand.  
+The great inventors and benefactors of mankind live too far away on 
+a plane by themselves to be the object of jealousy to any but a 
+very small circle; on the other hand, in these days of equality, 
+especially in this country where caste has never existed, the 
+social world seems to hold out alluring and tangible gifts to him 
+who can enter its enchanted portals.  Even politics, to judge by 
+the actions of some of our legislators, of late, would seem to be 
+only a stepping-stone to its door!
+
+"But my question," I hear my fair interlocutor saying.  "You are 
+not answering it!"
+
+All in good time, my dear.  I am just about to do so.  Did you ever 
+hear of Darwin and his theory of "selection?"  It would be a slight 
+to your intelligence not to take it for granted that you had.  
+Well, my observations in the world lead me to believe that we 
+follow there unconsciously, the same rules that guide the wild 
+beasts in the forest.  Certain individuals are endowed by nature 
+with temperaments which make them take naturally to a social life 
+and shine there.  In it they find their natural element.  They 
+develop freely just where others shrivel up and disappear.  There 
+is continually going on unseen a "natural selection," the 
+discarding of unfit material, the assimilation of new and congenial 
+elements from outside, with the logical result of a survival of the 
+fittest.  Aside from this, you will find in "the world," as 
+anywhere else, that the person who succeeds is generally he who has 
+been willing to give the most of his strength and mind to that one 
+object, and has not allowed the flowers on the hillside to distract 
+him from his path, remembering also that genius is often but the 
+"capacity for taking infinite pains."
+
+There are people so constituted that they cheerfully give the 
+efforts of a lifetime to the attainment of a brilliant social 
+position.  No fatigue is too great, and no snubs too bitter to be 
+willingly undergone in pursuit of the cherished object.  You will 
+never find such an individual, for instance, wandering in the 
+flowery byways that lead to art or letters, for that would waste 
+his time.  If his family are too hard to raise, he will abandon the 
+attempt and rise without them, for he cannot help himself.  He is 
+but an atom working as blindly upward as the plant that pushes its 
+mysterious way towards the sun.  Brains are not necessary.  Good 
+looks are but a trump the more in the "hand."  Manners may help, 
+but are not essential.  The object can be and is attained daily 
+without all three.  Wealth is but the oil that makes the machinery 
+run more smoothly.  The all-important factor is the desire to 
+succeed, so strong that it makes any price seem cheap, and that can 
+pay itself by a step gained, for mortification and weariness and 
+heart-burnings.
+
+There, my dear, is the secret of success!  I stop because I feel 
+myself becoming bitter, and that is a frame of mind to be carefully 
+avoided, because it interferes with the digestion and upsets one's 
+gentle calm!  I have tried to answer your question.  The answer 
+resolves itself into these two things; that it is necessary to be 
+born with qualities which you may not possess, and calls for 
+sacrifices you would doubtless be unwilling to make.  It remains 
+with you to decide if the little game is worth the candle.  The 
+delightful common sense I feel quite sure you possess reassures me 
+as to your answer.
+
+Take gayly such good things as may float your way, and profit by 
+them while they last.  Wander off into all the cross-roads that 
+tempt you.  Stop often to lend a helping hand to a less fortunate 
+traveller.  Rest in the heat of the day, as your spirit prompts 
+you.  Sit down before the sunset and revel in its beauty and you 
+will find your voyage through life much more satisfactory to look 
+back to and full of far sweeter memories than if by sacrificing any 
+of these pleasures you had attained the greatest of "positions."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 35 - Living on your Friends
+
+
+THACKERAY devoted a chapter in "Vanity Fair" to the problem "How to 
+Live Well on Nothing a Year."  It was neither a very new nor a very 
+ingenious expedient that "Becky" resorted to when she discounted 
+her husband's position and connection to fleece the tradespeople 
+and cheat an old family servant out of a year's rent.  The author 
+might more justly have used his clever phrase in describing "Major 
+Pendennis's" agreeable existence.  We have made great progress in 
+this, as in almost every other mode of living, in the latter half 
+of the Victorian era; intelligent individuals of either sex, who 
+know the ropes, can now as easily lead the existence of a multi-
+millionaire (with as much satisfaction to themselves and their 
+friends) as though the bank account, with all its attendant 
+worries, stood in their own names.  This subject is so vast, its 
+ramifications so far-reaching and complicated, that one hesitates 
+before launching into an analysis of it.  It will be better simply 
+to give a few interesting examples, and a general rule or two, for 
+the enlightenment and guidance of ingenious souls.
+
+Human nature changes little; all that our educational and social 
+training has accomplished is a smoothing of the surface.  One of 
+the most striking proofs of this is, that here in our primitive 
+country, as soon as accumulation of capital allowed certain 
+families to live in great luxury, they returned to the ways of 
+older aristocracies, and, with other wants, felt the necessity of a 
+court about them, ladies and gentlemen in waiting, pages and 
+jesters.  Nature abhors a vacuum, so a class of people immediately 
+felt an irresistible impulse to rush in and fill the void.  Our 
+aristocrats were not even obliged to send abroad to fill these 
+vacancies, as they were for their footmen and butlers; the native 
+article was quite ready and willing and, considering the little 
+practice it could have had, proved wonderfully adapted to the work.
+
+When the mania for building immense country houses and yachts (the 
+owning of opera boxes goes a little further back) first attacked 
+this country, the builders imagined that, once completed, it would 
+be the easiest, as well as the most delightful task to fill them 
+with the pick of their friends, that they could get all the 
+talented and agreeable people they wanted by simply making a sign.  
+To their astonishment, they discovered that what appeared so simple 
+was a difficult, as well as a thankless labor.  I remember asking a 
+lady who had owned a "proscenium" at the old Academy, why she had 
+decided not to take a box in the (then) new opera-house.
+
+"Because, having passed thirty years of my life inviting people to 
+sit in my box, I intend now to rest."  It is very much the same 
+thing with yachts.  A couple who had determined to go around the 
+world, in their lately finished boat, were dumbfounded to find 
+their invitations were not eagerly accepted.  After exhausting the 
+small list of people they really wanted, they began with others 
+indifferent to them, and even then filled out their number with 
+difficulty.  A hostess who counts on a series of house parties 
+through the autumn months, must begin early in the summer if she is 
+to have the guests she desires.
+
+It is just here that the "professional," if I may be allowed to use 
+such an expression, comes to the front.  He is always available.  
+It is indifferent to him if he starts on a tour around the world or 
+for a winter spree to Montreal.  He is always amusing, good-
+humored, and can be counted on at the last moment to fill any 
+vacant place, without being the least offended at the tardy 
+invitation, for he belongs to the class who have discovered "how to 
+live well on nothing a year."  Luxury is as the breath of his 
+nostrils, but his means allow of little beyond necessities.  The 
+temptation must be great when everything that he appreciates most 
+(and cannot afford) is urged upon him.  We should not pose as too 
+stern moralists, and throw stones at him; for there may enter more 
+"best French plate" into the composition of our own houses than we 
+imagine.
+
+It is here our epoch shows its improvement over earlier and cruder 
+days.  At present no toad-eating is connected with the acceptance 
+of hospitality, or, if occasionally a small "batrachian" is 
+offered, it is so well disguised by an accomplished CHEF, and 
+served on such exquisite old Dresden, that it slips down with very 
+little effort.  Even this rarely occurs, unless the guest has 
+allowed himself to become the inmate of a residence or yacht.  Then 
+he takes his chance with other members of the household, and if the 
+host or hostess happens to have a bad temper as a set-off to their 
+good table, it is apt to fare ill with our friend.
+
+So far, I have spoken of this class in the masculine, which is an 
+error, as the art is successfully practised by the weaker sex, with 
+this shade of difference.  As an unmarried woman is in less general 
+demand, she is apt to attach herself to one dear friend, always 
+sure to be a lady in possession of fine country and city houses and 
+other appurtenances of wealth, often of inferior social standing; 
+so that there is give and take, the guest rendering real service to 
+an ambitious hostess.  The feminine aspirant need not be handsome.  
+On the contrary, an agreeable plainness is much more acceptable, 
+serving as a foil.  But she must be excellent in all games, from 
+golf to piquet, and willing to play as often and as long as 
+required.  She must also cheerfully go in to dinner with the blue 
+ribbon bore of the evening, only asked on account of his pretty 
+wife (by the bye, why is it that Beauty is so often flanked by the 
+Beast?), and sit between him and the "second prize" bore.  These 
+two worthies would have been the portion of the hostess fifteen 
+years ago; she would have considered it her duty to absorb them and 
+prevent her other guests suffering.  MAIS NOUS AVONS CHANGE TOUT 
+CELA.  The lady of the house now thinks first of amusing herself, 
+and arranges to sit between two favorites.
+
+Society has become much simpler, and especially less expensive, for 
+unmarried men than it used to be.  Even if a hostess asks a favor 
+in return for weeks of hospitality, the sacrifice she requires of a 
+man is rarely greater than a cotillion with an unattractive 
+debutante whom she is trying to launch; or the sitting through a 
+particularly dull opera in order to see her to the carriage, her 
+lord and master having slipped off early to his club and a quiet 
+game of pool.  Many people who read these lines are old enough to 
+remember that prehistoric period when unmarried girls went to the 
+theatre and parties, alone with the men they knew.  This custom 
+still prevails in our irrepressible West.  It was an arrangement by 
+which all the expenses fell on the man - theatre tickets, carriages 
+if it rained, and often a bit of supper after.  If a youth asked a 
+girl to dance the cotillion, he was expected to send a bouquet, 
+sure to cost between twenty and twenty-five dollars.  What a 
+blessed change for the impecunious swell when all this went out of 
+fashion!  New York is his paradise now; in other parts of the world 
+something is still expected of him.  In France it takes the form of 
+a handsome bag of bon-bons on New Year's Day, if he has accepted 
+hospitality during the past year.  While here he need do absolutely 
+nothing (unless he wishes to), the occasional leaving of a card 
+having been suppressed of late by our JEUNESSE DOREE, five minutes 
+of their society in an opera box being estimated (by them) as ample 
+return for a dinner or a week in a country house.
+
+The truth of it is, there are so few men who "go out" (it being 
+practically impossible for any one working at a serious profession 
+to sit up night after night, even if he desired), and at the same 
+time so many women insist on entertaining to amuse themselves or 
+better their position, that the men who go about get spoiled and 
+almost come to consider the obligation conferred, when they dine 
+out.  There is no more amusing sight than poor paterfamilias 
+sitting in the club between six and seven P.M. pretending to read 
+the evening paper, but really with his eve on the door; he has been 
+sent down by his wife to "get a man," as she is one short for her 
+dinner this evening.  He must be one who will fit in well with the 
+other guests; hence papa's anxious look, and the reason the 
+editorial gets so little of his attention!  Watch him as young 
+"professional" lounges in.  There is just his man - if he only 
+happens to be disengaged!  You will see "Pater" cross the room and 
+shake hands, then, after a few minutes' whispered conversation, he 
+will walk down to his coupe with such a relieved look on his face.  
+Young "professional," who is in faultless evening dress, will ring 
+for a cocktail and take up the discarded evening paper to pass the 
+time till eight twenty-five.
+
+Eight twenty-five, advisedly, for he will be the last to arrive, 
+knowing, clever dog, how much eCLAT it gives one to have a room 
+full of people asking each other, "Whom are we waiting for?" when 
+the door opens, and he is announced.  He will stay a moment after 
+the other guests have gone and receive the most cordial pressures 
+of the hand from a grateful hostess (if not spoken words of thanks) 
+in return for eating an exquisitely cooked dinner, seated between 
+two agreeable women, drinking irreproachable wine, smoking a cigar, 
+and washing the whole down with a glass of 1830 brandy, or some 
+priceless historic madeira.
+
+There is probably a moral to be extracted from all this.  But 
+frankly my ethics are so mixed that I fail to see where the blame 
+lies, and which is the less worthy individual, the ostentatious 
+axe-grinding host or the interested guest.  One thing, however, I 
+see clearly, viz., that life is very agreeable to him who starts in 
+with few prejudices, good manners, a large amount of well-concealed 
+"cheek" and the happy faculty of taking things as they come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 36 - American Society in Italy
+
+
+THE phrase at the head of this chapter and other sentences, such as 
+"American Society in Paris," or London, are constantly on the lips 
+of people who should know better.  In reality these societies do 
+not exist.  Does my reader pause, wondering if he can believe his 
+eyes?  He has doubtless heard all his life of these delightful 
+circles, and believes in them.  He may even have dined, EN PASSANT, 
+at the "palace" of some resident compatriot in Rome or Florence, 
+under the impression that he was within its mystic limits.  
+Illusion!  An effect of mirage, making that which appears quite 
+tangible and solid when viewed from a distance dissolve into thin 
+air as one approaches; like the mirage, cheating the weary 
+traveller with a vision of what he most longs for.
+
+Forty, even fifty years ago, there lived in Rome a group of very 
+agreeable people; Story and the two Greenoughs and Crawford, the 
+sculptor (father of the brilliant novelist of today); Charlotte 
+Cushman (who divided her time between Rome and Newport), and her 
+friend Miss Stebbins, the sculptress, to whose hands we owe the 
+bronze fountain on the Mall in our Park; Rogers, then working at 
+the bronze doors of our capitol, and many other cultivated and 
+agreeable people.  Hawthorne passed a couple of winters among them, 
+and the tone of that society is reflected in his "Marble Faun."  He 
+took Story as a model for his "Kenyon," and was the first to note 
+the exotic grace of an American girl in that strange setting.  They 
+formed as transcendental and unworldly a group as ever gathered 
+about a "tea" table.  Great things were expected of them and their 
+influence, but they disappointed the world, and, with the exception 
+of Hawthorne, are being fast forgotten.
+
+Nothing could be simpler than life in the papal capital in those 
+pleasant days.  Money was rare, but living as delightfully 
+inexpensive.  It was about that time, if I do not mistake, that a 
+list was published in New York of the citizens worth one hundred 
+thousand dollars; and it was not a long one!  The Roman colony took 
+"tea" informally with each other, and "received" on stated evenings 
+in their studios (when mulled claret and cakes were the only 
+refreshment offered; very bad they were, too), and migrated in the 
+summer to the mountains near Rome or to Sorrento.  In the winter 
+months their circle was enlarged by a contingent from home.  Among 
+wealthy New Yorkers, it was the fashion in the early fifties to 
+pass a winter in Rome, when, together with his other dissipations, 
+paterfamilias would sit to one of the American sculptors for his 
+bust, which accounts for the horrors one now runs across in dark 
+corners of country houses, - ghostly heads in "chin whiskers" and 
+Roman draperies.
+
+The son of one of these pioneers, more rich than cultivated, 
+noticed the other day, while visiting a friend of mine, an 
+exquisite eighteenth-century bust of Madame de Pompadour, the pride 
+of his hostess's drawing-room.  "Ah!" said Midas, "are busts the 
+fashion again?  I have one of my father, done in Rome in 1850.  I 
+will bring it down and put it in my parlor."
+
+The travellers consulted the residents in their purchases of copies 
+of the old masters, for there were fashions in these luxuries as in 
+everything else.  There was a run at that time on the "Madonna in 
+the Chair;" and "Beatrice Cenci" was long prime favorite.  
+Thousands of the latter leering and winking over her everlasting 
+shoulder, were solemnly sent home each year.  No one ever dreamed 
+of buying an original painting!  The tourists also developed a 
+taste for large marble statues, "Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii" 
+(people read Bulwer, Byron and the Bible then) being in such demand 
+that I knew one block in lower Fifth Avenue that possessed seven 
+blind Nydias, all life-size, in white marble, - a form of 
+decoration about as well adapted to those scanty front parlors as a 
+steam engine or a carriage and pair would have been.  I fear 
+Bulwer's heroine is at a discount now, and often wonder as I see 
+those old residences turning into shops, what has become of the 
+seven white elephants and all their brothers and sisters that our 
+innocent parents brought so proudly back from Italy!  I have 
+succeeded in locating two statues evidently imported at that time.  
+They grace the back steps of a rather shabby villa in the country, 
+- Demosthenes and Cicero, larger than life, dreary, funereal 
+memorials of the follies of our fathers.
+
+The simple days we have been speaking of did not, however, outlast 
+the circle that inaugurated them.  About 1867 a few rich New 
+Yorkers began "trying to know the Italians" and go about with them.  
+One family, "up to snuff" in more senses than one, married their 
+daughter to the scion of a princely house, and immediately a large 
+number of her compatriots were bitten with the madness of going 
+into Italian society.
+
+In 1870, Rome became the capital of united Italy.  The court 
+removed there.  The "improvements" began.  Whole quarters were 
+remodelled, and the dear old Rome of other days, the Rome of 
+Hawthorne and Madame de Stael, was swept away.  With this new state 
+of things came a number of Americo-Italian marriages more or less 
+successful; and anything like an American society, properly so-
+called, disappeared.  To-day families of our compatriots passing 
+the winter months in Rome are either tourists who live in hotels, 
+and see sights, or go (as far as they can) into Italian society.
+
+The Queen of Italy, who speaks excellent English, developed a 
+PENCHANT for Americans, and has attached several who married 
+Italians to her person in different court capacities; indeed, the 
+old "Black" society, who have remained true to the Pope, when they 
+wish to ridicule the new "White" or royal circle, call it the 
+"American court!"  The feeling is bitter still between the "Blacks" 
+and "Whites," and an American girl who marries into one of these 
+circles must make up her mind to see nothing of friends or 
+relatives in the opposition ranks.  It is said that an amalgamation 
+is being brought about, but it is slow work; a generation will have 
+to die out before much real mingling of the two courts will take 
+place.  As both these circles are poor, very little entertainment 
+goes on.  One sees a little life in the diplomatic world, and the 
+King and Queen give a ball or two during the winter, but since the 
+repeated defeats of the Italian arms in Africa, and the heavy 
+financial difficulties (things these sovereigns take very seriously 
+to heart), there has not been much "go" in the court 
+entertainments.
+
+The young set hope great things of the new Princess of Naples, the 
+bride of the heir-apparent, a lady who is credited with being full 
+of fun and life; it is fondly imagined that she will set the ball 
+rolling again.  By the bye, her first lady-in-waiting, the young 
+Duchess del Monte of Naples, was an American girl, and a very 
+pretty one, too.  She enjoyed for some time the enviable 
+distinction of being the youngest and handsomest duchess in Europe, 
+until Miss Vanderbilt married Marlborough and took the record from 
+her.  The Prince and Princess of Naples live at their Neapolitan 
+capital, and will not do much to help things in Rome.  Besides 
+which he is very delicate and passes for not being any too fond of 
+the world.
+
+What makes things worse is that the great nobles are mostly "land 
+poor," and even the richer ones burned their fingers in the craze 
+for speculation that turned all Rome upside down in the years 
+following 1870 and Italian unity, when they naively imagined their 
+new capital was to become again after seventeen centuries the 
+metropolis of the world.  Whole quarters of new houses were run up 
+for a population that failed to appear; these houses now stand 
+empty and are fast going to ruin.  So that little in the way of 
+entertaining is to be expected from the bankrupts.  They are a 
+genial race, these Italian nobles, and welcome rich strangers and 
+marry them with much enthusiasm - just a shade too much, perhaps - 
+the girl counting for so little and her DOT for so much in the 
+matrimonial scale.  It is only necessary to keep open house to have 
+the pick of the younger ones as your guests.  They will come to 
+entertainments at American houses and bring all their relations, 
+and dance, and dine, and flirt with great good humor and 
+persistency; but if there is not a good solid fortune in the 
+background, in the best of securities, the prettiest American 
+smiles never tempt them beyond flirtation; the season over, they 
+disappear up into their mountain villas to wait for a new 
+importation from the States.
+
+In Rome, as well as in the other Italian cities, there are, of 
+course, still to be found Americans in some numbers (where on the 
+Continent will you not find them?), living quietly for study or 
+economy.  But they are not numerous or united enough to form a 
+society; and are apt to be involved in bitter strife among 
+themselves.
+
+Why, you ask, should Americans quarrel among themselves?
+
+Some years ago I was passing the summer months on the Rhine at a 
+tiny German watering-place, principally frequented by English, who 
+were all living together in great peace and harmony, until one 
+fatal day, when an Earl appeared.  He was a poor Irish Earl, very 
+simple and unoffending, but he brought war into that town, heart-
+burnings, envy, and backbiting.  The English colony at once divided 
+itself into two camps, those who knew the Earl and those who did 
+not.  And peace fled from our little society.  You will find in 
+every foreign capital among the resident Americans, just such a 
+state of affairs as convulsed that German spa.  The native "swells" 
+have come to be the apple of discord that divides our good people 
+among themselves.  Those who have been successful in knowing the 
+foreigners avoid their compatriots and live with their new friends, 
+while the other group who, from laziness, disinclination, or 
+principle (?) have remained true to their American circle, cannot 
+resist calling the others snobs, and laughing (a bit enviously, 
+perhaps) at their upward struggles.
+
+It is the same in Florence.  The little there was left of an 
+American society went to pieces on that rock.  Our parents forty 
+years ago seem to me to have been much more self-respecting and 
+sensible.  They knew perfectly well that there was nothing in 
+common between themselves and the Italian nobility, and that those 
+good people were not going to put themselves out to make the 
+acquaintance of a lot of strangers, mostly of another religion, 
+unless it was to be materially to their advantage.  So they left 
+them quietly alone.  I do not pretend to judge any one's motives, 
+but confess I cannot help regarding with suspicion a foreigner who 
+leaves his own circle to mingle with strangers.  It resembles too 
+closely the amiabilities of the wolf for the lamb, or the sudden 
+politeness of a school-boy to a little girl who has received a box 
+of candies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 37 - The Newport of the Past
+
+
+FEW of the "carriage ladies and gentlemen" who disport themselves 
+in Newport during the summer months, yachting and dancing through 
+the short season, then flitting away to fresh fields and pastures 
+new, realize that their daintily shod feet have been treading 
+historic ground, or care to cast a thought back to the past.  Oddly 
+enough, to the majority of people the past is a volume rarely 
+opened.  Not that it bores them to read it, but because they, like 
+children, want some one to turn over its yellow leaves and point 
+out the pictures to them.  Few of the human motes that dance in the 
+rays of the afternoon sun as they slant across the little Park, 
+think of the fable which asserts that a sea-worn band of 
+adventurous men, centuries before the Cabots or the Genoese 
+discoverer thought of crossing the Atlantic, had pushed bravely out 
+over untried seas and landed on this rocky coast.  Yet one apparent 
+evidence of their stay tempts our thoughts back to the times when 
+it is said to have been built as a bower for a king's daughter.  
+Longfellow, in the swinging verse of his "Skeleton in Armor," 
+breathing of the sea and the Norseman's fatal love, has thrown such 
+a glamour of poetry around the tower, that one would fain believe 
+all he relates.  The hardy Norsemen, if they ever came here, 
+succumbed in their struggle with the native tribes, or, discouraged 
+by death and hardships, sailed away, leaving the clouds of oblivion 
+to close again darkly around this continent, and the fog of 
+discussion to circle around the "Old Mill."
+
+The little settlement of another race, speaking another tongue, 
+that centuries later sprang up in the shadow of the tower, quickly 
+grew into a busy and prosperous city, which, like New York, its 
+rival, was captured and held by the English.  To walk now through 
+some of its quaint, narrow streets is to step back into 
+Revolutionary days.  Hardly a house has changed since the time when 
+the red coats of the British officers brightened the prim 
+perspectives, and turned loyal young heads as they passed.
+
+At the corner of Spring and Pelham Streets, still stands the 
+residence of General Prescott, who was carried away prisoner by his 
+opponents, they having rowed down in whale-boats from Providence 
+for the attack.  Rochambeau, our French ally, lodged lower down in 
+Mary Street.  In the tower of Trinity, one can read the epitaph of 
+the unfortunate Chevalier de Ternay, commander of the sea forces, 
+whose body lies near by.  Many years later his relative, the Duc de 
+Noailles, when Minister to this country, had this simple tablet 
+repaired and made a visit to the spot.
+
+A long period of prosperity followed the Revolution, during which 
+Newport grew and flourished.  Our pious and God-fearing "forbears," 
+having secured personal and religious liberty, proceeded to 
+inaugurate a most successful and remunerative trade in rum and 
+slaves.  It was a triangular transaction and yielded a three-fold 
+profit.  The simple population of that day, numbering less than ten 
+thousand souls, possessed twenty distilleries; finding it a 
+physical impossibility to drink ALL the rum, they conceived the 
+happy thought of sending the surplus across to the coast of Africa, 
+where it appears to have been much appreciated by the native 
+chiefs, who eagerly exchanged the pick of their loyal subjects for 
+that liquid.  These poor brutes were taken to the West Indies and 
+exchanged for sugar, laden with which, the vessels returned to 
+Newport.
+
+Having introduced the dusky chieftains to the charms of delirium 
+tremens and their subjects to life-long slavery, one can almost see 
+these pious deacons proceeding to church to offer up thanks for the 
+return of their successful vessels.  Alas! even "the best laid 
+schemes of mice and men" come to an end.  The War of 1812, the 
+opening of the Erie Canal and sundry railways struck a blow at 
+Newport commerce, from which it never recovered.  The city sank 
+into oblivion, and for over thirty years not a house was built 
+there.
+
+It was not until near 1840 that the Middletons and Izzards and 
+other wealthy and aristocratic Southern families were tempted to 
+Newport by the climate and the facilities it offered for bathing, 
+shooting and boating.  A boarding-house or two sufficed for the 
+modest wants of the new-comers, first among which stood the 
+Aquidneck, presided over by kind Mrs. Murray.  It was not until 
+some years later, when New York and Boston families began to 
+appreciate the place, that the first hotels were built, - the 
+Atlantic on the square facing the old mill, the Bellevue and 
+Fillmore on Catherine Street, and finally the original Ocean House, 
+destroyed by fire in 1845 and rebuilt as we see it to-day.  The 
+croakers of the epoch considered it much too far out of town to be 
+successful, for at its door the open fields began, a gate there 
+separating the town from the country across which a straggling, 
+half-made road, closed by innumerable gates, led along the cliffs 
+and out across what is now the Ocean Drive.  The principal roads at 
+that time led inland; any one wishing to drive seaward had to 
+descend every two or three minutes to open a gate.  The youth of 
+the day discovered a source of income in opening and closing these 
+for pennies.
+
+Fashion had decreed that the correct hour for dancing was 11 A.M., 
+and MATINEES DANSANTES were regularly given at the hotels, our 
+grandmothers appearing in DECOLLETE muslin frocks adorned with 
+broad sashes, and disporting themselves gayly until the dinner 
+hour.  Low-neck dresses were the rule, not only for these informal 
+entertainments, but as every-day wear for young girls, - an old 
+lady only the other day telling me she had never worn a "high-body" 
+until after her marriage.  Two o'clock found all the beauties and 
+beaux dining.  How incredulously they would have laughed if any one 
+had prophesied that their grandchildren would prefer eight forty-
+five as a dinner hour!
+
+The opening of Bellevue Avenue marked another epoch in the history 
+of Newport.  About that time Governor Lawrence bought the whole of 
+Ochre Point farm for fourteen thousand dollars, and Mr. de Rham 
+built on the newly opened road the first "cottage," which stands 
+to-day modestly back from the avenue opposite Perry Street.  If 
+houses have souls, as Hawthorne averred, and can remember and 
+compare, what curious thoughts must pass through the oaken brain of 
+this simple construction as it sees its marble neighbors rearing 
+their vast facades among trees.  The trees, too, are an innovation, 
+for when the de Rham cottage was built and Mrs. Cleveland opened 
+her new house at the extreme end of Rough Point (the second summer 
+residence in the place) it is doubtful if a single tree broke the 
+rocky monotony of the landscape from the Ocean House to Bateman's 
+Point.
+
+Governor Lawrence, having sold one acre of his Ochre Point farm to 
+Mr. Pendleton for the price he himself had paid for the whole, 
+proceeded to build a stone wall between the two properties down to 
+the water's edge.  The population of Newport had been accustomed to 
+take their Sunday airings and moonlight rambles along "the cliffs," 
+and viewed this obstruction of their favorite walk with dismay.  So 
+strong was their feeling that when the wall was completed the young 
+men of the town repaired there in the night and tore it down.  It 
+was rebuilt, the mortar being mixed with broken glass.  This 
+infuriated the people to such an extent that the whole populace, in 
+broad daylight, accompanied by the summer visitors, destroyed the 
+wall and threw the materials into the sea.  Lawrence, bent on 
+maintaining what he considered his rights, called the law to his 
+aid.  It was then discovered that an immemorial riverain right gave 
+the fishermen and the public generally, access to the shore for 
+fishing, and also to collect seaweed, - a right of way that no one 
+could obstruct.
+
+This was the beginning of the long struggle between the cliff-
+dwellers and the townspeople; each new property-owner, disgusted at 
+the idea that all the world can stroll at will across his well-kept 
+lawns, has in turn tried his hand at suppressing the now famous 
+"walk."  Not only do the public claim the liberty to walk there, 
+but also the right to cross any property to get to the shore.  At 
+this moment the city fathers and the committee of the new buildings 
+at Bailey's Beach are wrangling as gayly as in Governor Lawrence's 
+day over a bit of wall lately constructed across the end of 
+Bellevue Avenue.  A new expedient has been hit upon by some of the 
+would-be exclusive owners of the cliffs; they have lowered the 
+"walk" out of sight, thus insuring their own privacy and in no way 
+interfering with the rights of the public.
+
+Among the gentlemen who settled in Newport about Governor 
+Lawrence's time was Lord Baltimore (Mr. Calvert, he preferred to 
+call himself), who remained there until his death.  He was shy of 
+referring to his English peerage, but would willingly talk of his 
+descent through his mother from Peter Paul Rubens, from whom had 
+come down to him a chateau in Holland and several splendid 
+paintings.  The latter hung in the parlor of the modest little 
+dwelling, where I was taken to see them and their owner many years 
+ago.  My introducer on this occasion was herself a lady of no 
+ordinary birth, being the daughter of Stuart, our greatest portrait 
+painter.  I have passed many quiet hours in the quaint studio (the 
+same her father had used), hearing her prattle - as she loved to do 
+if she found a sympathetic listener - of her father, of Washington 
+and his pompous ways, and the many celebrities who had in turn 
+posed before Stuart's easel.  She had been her father's companion 
+and aid, present at the sittings, preparing his brushes and colors, 
+and painting in backgrounds and accessories; and would willingly 
+show his palette and explain his methods and theories of color, his 
+predilection for scrumbling shadows thinly in black and then 
+painting boldly in with body color.  Her lessons had not profited 
+much to the gentle, kindly old lady, for the productions of her own 
+brush were far from resembling her great parent's work.  She, 
+however, painted cheerfully on to life's close, surrounded by her 
+many friends, foremost among whom was Charlotte Cushman, who also 
+passed the last years of her life in Newport.  Miss Stuart was over 
+eighty when I last saw her, still full of spirit and vigor, 
+beginning the portrait of a famous beauty of that day, since the 
+wife and mother of dukes.
+
+Miss Stuart's death seems to close one of the chapters in the 
+history of this city, and to break the last connecting link with 
+its past.  The world moves so quickly that the simple days and 
+modest amusements of our fathers and grandfathers have already 
+receded into misty remoteness.  We look at their portraits and 
+wonder vaguely at their graceless costumes.  We know they trod 
+these same streets, and laughed and flirted and married as we are 
+doing to-day, but they seem to us strangely far away, like 
+inhabitants of another sphere!
+
+It is humiliating to think how soon we, too, shall have become the 
+ancestors of a new and careless generation; fresh faces will 
+replace our faded ones, young voices will laugh as they look at our 
+portraits hanging in dark corners, wondering who we were, and 
+(criticising the apparel we think so artistic and appropriate) how 
+we could ever have made such guys of ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 38 - A Conquest of Europe
+
+
+THE most important event in modern history is the discovery of 
+Europe by the Americans.  Before it, the peoples of the Old World 
+lived happy and contented in their own countries, practising the 
+patriarchal virtues handed down to them from generations of 
+forebears, ignoring alike the vices and benefits of modern 
+civilization, as understood on this side of the Atlantic.  The 
+simple-minded Europeans remained at home, satisfied with the rank 
+in life where they had been born, and innocent of the ways of the 
+new world.
+
+These peoples were, on the whole, not so much to be pitied, for 
+they had many pleasing crafts and arts unknown to the invaders, 
+which had enabled them to decorate their capitals with taste in a 
+rude way; nothing really great like the lofty buildings and 
+elevated railway structures, executed in American cities, but 
+interesting as showing what an ingenious race, deprived of the 
+secrets of modern science, could accomplish.
+
+The more aesthetic of the newcomers even affected to admire the 
+antiquated places of worship and residences they visited abroad, 
+pointing out to their compatriots that in many cases marble, bronze 
+and other old-fashioned materials had been so cleverly treated as 
+to look almost like the superior cast-iron employed at home, and 
+that some of the old paintings, preserved with veneration in the 
+museums, had nearly the brilliancy of modern chromos.  As their 
+authors had, however, neglected to use a process lending itself to 
+rapid reproduction, they were of no practical value.  In other 
+ways, the continental races, when discovered, were sadly behind the 
+times.  In business, they ignored the use of "corners," that 
+backbone of American trade, and their ideas of advertising were but 
+little in advance of those known among the ancient Greeks.
+
+The discovery of Europe by the Americans was made about 1850, at 
+which date the first bands of adventurers crossed the seas in 
+search of amusement.  The reports these pioneers brought back of 
+the NAIVETE, politeness, and gullibility of the natives, and the 
+cheapness of existence in their cities, caused a general exodus 
+from the western to the eastern hemisphere.  Most of the Americans 
+who had used up their credit at home and those whose incomes were 
+insufficient for their wants, immediately migrated to these happy 
+hunting grounds, where life was inexpensive and credit unlimited.
+
+The first arrivals enjoyed for some twenty years unique 
+opportunities.  They were able to live in splendor for a pittance 
+that would barely have kept them in necessaries on their own side 
+of the Atlantic, and to pick up valuable specimens of native 
+handiwork for nominal sums.  In those happy days, to belong to the 
+invading race was a sufficient passport to the good graces of the 
+Europeans, who asked no other guarantees before trading with the 
+newcomers, but flocked around them, offering their services and 
+their primitive manufactures, convinced that Americans were all 
+wealthy.
+
+Alas!  History ever repeats itself.  As Mexicans and Peruvians, 
+after receiving their conquerors with confidence and enthusiasm, 
+came to rue the day they had opened their arms to strangers, so the 
+European peoples, before a quarter of a century was over, realized 
+that the hordes from across the sea who were over-running their 
+lands, raising prices, crowding the native students out of the 
+schools, and finally attempting to force an entrance into society, 
+had little to recommend them or justify their presence except 
+money.  Even in this some of the intruders were unsatisfactory.  
+Those who had been received into the "bosom" of hotels often forgot 
+to settle before departing.  The continental women who had provided 
+the wives of discoverers with the raiment of the country (a luxury 
+greatly affected by those ladies) found, to their disgust, that 
+their new customers were often unable or unwilling to offer any 
+remuneration.
+
+In consequence of these and many other disillusions, Americans 
+began to be called the "Destroyers," especially when it became 
+known that nothing was too heavy or too bulky to be carried away by 
+the invaders, who tore the insides from the native houses, the 
+paintings from the walls, the statues from the temples, and 
+transported this booty across the seas, much in the same way as the 
+Romans had plundered Greece.  Elaborate furniture seemed especially 
+to attract the new arrivals, who acquired vast quantities of it.
+
+Here, however, the wily natives (who were beginning to appreciate 
+their own belongings) had revenge.  Immense quantities of worthless 
+imitations were secretly manufactured and sold to the travellers at 
+fabulous prices.  The same artifice was used with paintings, said 
+to be by great masters, and with imitations of old stuffs and bric-
+a-brac, which the ignorant and arrogant invaders pretended to 
+appreciate and collect.
+
+Previous to our arrival there had been an invasion of the Continent 
+by the English about the year 1812.  One of their historians, 
+called Thackeray, gives an amusing account of this in the opening 
+chapters of his "Shabby Genteel Story."  That event, however, was 
+unimportant in comparison with the great American movement, 
+although both were characterized by the same total disregard of the 
+feelings and prejudices of indigenous populations.  The English 
+then walked about the continental churches during divine service, 
+gazing at the pictures and consulting their guide-books as 
+unconcernedly as our compatriots do to-day.  They also crowded into 
+theatres and concert halls, and afterwards wrote to the newspapers 
+complaining of the bad atmosphere of those primitive establishments 
+and of the long ENTR'ACTES.
+
+As long as the invaders confined themselves to such trifles, the 
+patient foreigners submitted to their overbearing and uncouth ways 
+because of the supposed benefit to trade.  The natives even went so 
+far as to build hotels for the accommodation and delight of the 
+invaders, abandoning whole quarters to their guests.
+
+There was, however, a point at which complacency stopped.  The 
+older civilizations had formed among themselves restricted and 
+exclusive societies, to which access was almost impossible to 
+strangers.  These sanctuaries tempted the immigrants, who offered 
+their fairest virgins and much treasure for the privilege of 
+admission.  The indigenous aristocrats, who were mostly poor, 
+yielded to these offers and a few Americans succeeded in forcing an 
+entrance.  But the old nobility soon became frightened at the 
+number and vulgarity of the invaders, and withdrew severely into 
+their shells, refusing to accept any further bribes either in the 
+form of females or finance.
+
+From this moment dates the humiliation of the discoverers.  All 
+their booty and plunder seemed worthless in comparison with the 
+Elysian delights they imagined were concealed behind the closed 
+doors of those holy places, visions of which tortured the women 
+from the western hemisphere and prevented their taking any pleasure 
+in other victories.  To be received into those inner circles became 
+their chief ambition.  With this end in view they dressed 
+themselves in expensive costumes, took the trouble to learn the 
+"lingo" spoken in the country, went to the extremity of copying the 
+ways of the native women by painting their faces, and in one or two 
+cases imitated the laxity of their morals.
+
+In spite of these concessions, our women were not received with 
+enthusiasm.  On the contrary, the very name of an American became a 
+byword and an abomination in every continental city.  This 
+prejudice against us abroad is hardly to be wondered at on 
+reflecting what we have done to acquire it.  The agents chosen by 
+our government to treat diplomatically with the conquered nations, 
+owe their selection to political motives rather than to their tact 
+or fitness.  In the large majority of cases men are sent over who 
+know little either of the habits or languages prevailing in Europe.
+
+The worst elements always follow in the wake of discovery.  Our 
+settlements abroad gradually became the abode of the compromised, 
+the divorced, the socially and financially bankrupt.
+
+Within the last decade we have found a way to revenge the slights 
+put upon us, especially those offered to Americans in the capital 
+of Gaul.  Having for the moment no playwrights of our own, the men 
+who concoct dramas, comedies, and burlesques for our stage find, 
+instead of wearying themselves in trying to produce original 
+matter, that it is much simpler to adapt from French writers.  This 
+has been carried to such a length that entire French plays are now 
+produced in New York signed by American names.
+
+The great French playwrights can protect themselves by taking out 
+American copyright, but if one of them omits this formality, the 
+"conquerors" immediately seize upon his work and translate it, 
+omitting intentionally all mention of the real author on their 
+programmes.  This season a play was produced of which the first act 
+was taken from Guy de Maupassant, the second and third "adapted" 
+from Sardou, with episodes introduced from other authors to 
+brighten the mixture.  The piece thus patched together is signed by 
+a well-known Anglo-Saxon name, and accepted by our moral public, 
+although the original of the first act was stopped by the Parisian 
+police as too immoral for that gay capital.
+
+Of what use would it be to "discover" a new continent unless the 
+explorers were to reap some such benefits?  Let us take every 
+advantage that our proud position gives us, plundering the foreign 
+authors, making penal settlements of their capitals, and ignoring 
+their foolish customs and prejudices when we travel among them!  In 
+this way shall we effectually impress on the inferior races across 
+the Atlantic the greatness of the American nation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 39 - A Race of Slaves
+
+
+IT is all very well for us to have invaded Europe, and awakened 
+that somnolent continent to the lights and delights of American 
+ways; to have beautified the cities of the old world with graceful 
+trolleys and illuminated the catacombs at Rome with electricity.  
+Every true American must thrill with satisfaction at these 
+achievements, and the knowledge that he belongs to a dominating 
+race, before which the waning civilization of Europe must fade away 
+and disappear.
+
+To have discovered Europe and to rule as conquerors abroad is well, 
+but it is not enough, if we are led in chains at home.  It is 
+recorded of a certain ambitious captain whose "Commentaries" made 
+our school-days a burden, that "he preferred to be the first in a 
+village rather than second at Rome."  Oddly enough, WE are 
+contented to be slaves in our villages while we are conquerors in 
+Rome.  Can it be that the struggles of our ancestors for freedom 
+were fought in vain?  Did they throw off the yoke of kings, cross 
+the Atlantic, found a new form of government on a new continent, 
+break with traditions, and sign a declaration of independence, only 
+that we should succumb, a century later, yielding the fruits of 
+their hard-fought battles with craven supineness into the hands of 
+corporations and municipalities; humbly bowing necks that refuse to 
+bend before anointed sovereigns, to the will of steamboat 
+subordinates, the insolence of be-diamonded hotel-clerks, and the 
+captious conductor?
+
+Last week my train from Washington arrived in Jersey City on time.  
+We scurried (like good Americans) to the ferry-boat, hot and tired 
+and anxious to get to our destination; a hope deferred, however, 
+for our boat was kept waiting forty long minutes, because, 
+forsooth, another train from somewhere in the South was behind 
+time.  Expostulations were in vain.  Being only the paying public, 
+we had no rights that those autocrats, the officials, were bound to 
+respect.  The argument that if they knew the southern train to be 
+so much behind, the ferry-boat would have plenty of time to take us 
+across and return, was of no avail, so, like a cargo of "moo-cows" 
+(as the children say), we submitted meekly.  In order to make the 
+time pass more pleasantly for the two hundred people gathered on 
+the boat, a dusky potentate judged the moment appropriate to scrub 
+the cabin floors.  So, aided by a couple of subordinates, he 
+proceeded to deluge the entire place in floods of water, obliging 
+us to sit with our feet tucked up under us, splashing the ladies' 
+skirts and our wraps and belongings.
+
+Such treatment of the public would have raised a riot anywhere but 
+in this land of freedom.  Do you suppose any one murmured?  Not at 
+all.  The well-trained public had the air of being in church.  My 
+neighbors appeared astonished at my impatience, and informed me 
+that they were often detained in that way, as the company was short 
+of boats, but they hoped to have a new one in a year or two.  This 
+detail did not prevent that corporation advertising our train to 
+arrive in New York at three-thirteen, instead of which we landed at 
+four o'clock.  If a similar breach of contract had happened in 
+England, a dozen letters would have appeared in the "Times," and 
+the grievance been well aired.
+
+Another infliction to which all who travel in America are subjected 
+is the brushing atrocity.  Twenty minutes before a train arrives at 
+its destination, the despot who has taken no notice of any one up 
+to this moment, except to snub them, becomes suspiciously attentive 
+and insists on brushing everybody.  The dirt one traveller has been 
+accumulating is sent in clouds into the faces of his neighbors.  
+When he is polished off and has paid his "quarter" of tribute, the 
+next man gets up, and the dirt is then brushed back on to number 
+one, with number two's collection added.
+
+Labiche begins one of his plays with two servants at work in a 
+salon.  "Dusting," says one of them, "is the art of sending the 
+dirt from the chair on the right over to the sofa on the left."  I 
+always think of that remark when I see the process performed in a 
+parlor car, for when it is over we are all exactly where we began.  
+If a man should shampoo his hair, or have his boots cleaned in a 
+salon, he would be ejected as a boor; yet the idea apparently never 
+enters the heads of those who soil and choke their fellow-
+passengers that the brushing might be done in the vestibule.
+
+On the subject of fresh air and heat we are also in the hands of 
+officials, dozens of passengers being made to suffer for the 
+caprices of one of their number, or the taste of some captious 
+invalid.  In other lands the rights of minorities are often 
+ignored.  With us it is the contrary.  One sniffling school-girl 
+who prefers a temperature of 80 degrees can force a car full of 
+people to swelter in an atmosphere that is death to them, because 
+she refuses either to put on her wraps or to have a window opened.
+
+Street railways are torture-chambers where we slaves are made to 
+suffer in another way.  You must begin to reel and plunge towards 
+the door at least two blocks before your destination, so as to leap 
+to the ground when the car slows up; otherwise the conductor will 
+be offended with you, and carry you several squares too far, or 
+with a jocose "Step lively," will grasp your elbow and shoot you 
+out.  Any one who should sit quietly in his place until the vehicle 
+had come to a full stop, would be regarded by the slave-driver and 
+his cargo as a POSEUR who was assuming airs.
+
+The idea that cars and boats exist for the convenience of the 
+public was exploded long ago.  We are made, dozens of times a day, 
+to feel that this is no longer the case.  It is, on the contrary, 
+brought vividly home to us that such conveyances are money making 
+machines in the possession of powerful corporations (to whom we, in 
+our debasement, have handed over the freedom of our streets and 
+rivers), and are run in the interest and at the discretion of their 
+owners.
+
+It is not only before the great and the powerful that we bow in 
+submission.  The shop-girl is another tyrant who has planted her 
+foot firmly on the neck of the nation.  She respects neither sex 
+nor age.  Ensconced behind the bulwark of her counter, she scorns 
+to notice humble aspirants until they have performed a preliminary 
+penance; a time she fills up in cheerful conversation addressed to 
+other young tyrants, only deciding to notice customers when she 
+sees their last grain of patience is exhausted.  She is often of a 
+merry mood, and if anything about your appearance or manner strikes 
+her critical sense as amusing, will laugh gayly with her companions 
+at your expense.
+
+A French gentleman who speaks our language correctly but with some 
+accent, told me that he found it impossible to get served in our 
+stores, the shop-girls bursting with laughter before he could make 
+his wants known.
+
+Not long ago I was at the Compagnie Lyonnaise in Paris with a stout 
+American lady, who insisted on tipping her chair forward on its 
+front legs as she selected some laces.  Suddenly the chair flew 
+from under her, and she sat violently on the polished floor in an 
+attitude so supremely comic that the rest of her party were 
+inwardly convulsed.  Not a muscle moved in the faces of the well-
+trained clerks.  The proprietor assisted her to rise as gravely as 
+if he were bowing us to our carriage.
+
+In restaurants American citizens are treated even worse than in the 
+shops.  You will see cowed customers who are anxious to get away to 
+their business or pleasure sitting mutely patient, until a waiter 
+happens to remember their orders.  I do not know a single 
+establishment in this city where the waiters take any notice of 
+their customers' arrival, or where the proprietor comes, toward the 
+end of the meal, to inquire if the dishes have been cooked to their 
+taste.  The interest so general on the Continent or in England is 
+replaced here by the same air of being disturbed from more 
+important occupations, that characterizes the shop-girl and 
+elevator boy.
+
+Numbers of our people live apparently in awe of their servants and 
+the opinion of the tradespeople.  One middle-aged lady whom I 
+occasionally take to the theatre, insists when we arrive at her 
+door on my accompanying her to the elevator, in order that the 
+youth who presides therein may see that she has an escort, the 
+opinion of this subordinate apparently being of supreme importance 
+to her.  One of our "gilded youths" recently told me of a thrilling 
+adventure in which he had figured.  At the moment he was passing 
+under an awning on his way to a reception, a gust of wind sent his 
+hat gambolling down the block.  "Think what a situation," he 
+exclaimed.  "There stood a group of my friends' footmen watching 
+me.  But I was equal to the situation and entered the house as if 
+nothing had happened!"  Sir Walter Raleigh sacrificed a cloak to 
+please a queen.  This youth abandoned a new hat, fearing the 
+laughter of a half-dozen servants.
+
+One of the reasons why we have become so weak in the presence of 
+our paid masters is that nowhere is the individual allowed to 
+protest.  The other night a friend who was with me at a theatre 
+considered the acting inferior, and expressed his opinion by 
+hissing.  He was promptly ejected by a policeman.  The man next me 
+was, on the contrary, so pleased with the piece that he encored 
+every song.  I had paid to see the piece once, and rebelled at 
+being obliged to see it twice to suit my neighbor.  On referring 
+the matter to the box-office, the caliph in charge informed me that 
+the slaves he allowed to enter his establishment (like those who in 
+other days formed the court of Louis XIV.) were permitted to 
+praise, but were suppressed if they murmured dissent.  In his 
+MEMOIRES, Dumas, PERE, tells of a "first night" when three thousand 
+people applauded a play of his and one spectator hissed.  "He was 
+the only one I respected," said Dumas, "for the piece was bad, and 
+that criticism spurred me on to improve it."
+
+How can we hope for any improvement in the standard of our 
+entertainments, the manners of our servants or the ways of 
+corporations when no one complains?  We are too much in a hurry to 
+follow up a grievance and have it righted.  "It doesn't pay," "I 
+haven't got the time," are phrases with which all such subjects are 
+dismissed.  We will sit in over-heated cars, eat vilely cooked 
+food, put up with insolence from subordinates, because it is too 
+much trouble to assert our rights.  Is the spirit that prompted the 
+first shots on Lexington Common becoming extinct?  Have the floods 
+of emigration so diluted our Anglo-Saxon blood that we no longer 
+care to fight for liberty?  Will no patriot arise and lead a revolt 
+against our tyrants?
+
+I am prepared to follow such a leader, and have already marked my 
+prey.  First, I will slay a certain miscreant who sits at the 
+receipt of customs in the box-office of an up-town theatre.  For 
+years I have tried to propitiate that satrap with modest politeness 
+and feeble little jokes.  He has never been softened by either, but 
+continues to "chuck" the worst places out to me (no matter how 
+early I arrive, the best have always been given to the 
+speculators), and to frown down my attempts at self-assertion.
+
+When I have seen this enemy at my feet, I shall start down town 
+(stopping on the way to brain the teller at my bank, who is 
+perennially paring his nails, and refuses to see me until that 
+operation is performed), to the office of a night-boat line, where 
+the clerk has so often forced me, with hundreds of other weary 
+victims, to stand in line like convicts, while he chats with a 
+"lady friend," his back turned to us and his leg comfortably thrown 
+over the arm of his chair.  Then I will take my blood-stained way - 
+but, no!  It is better not to put my victims on their guard, but to 
+abide my time in silence!  Courage, fellow-slaves, our day will 
+come!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 40 - Introspection *
+
+
+THE close of a year must bring even to the careless and the least 
+inclined toward self-inspection, an hour of thoughtfulness, a 
+desire to glance back across the past, and set one's mental house 
+in order, before starting out on another stage of the journey for 
+that none too distant bourne toward which we all are moving.
+
+* December thirty-first, 1888.
+
+Our minds are like solitary dwellers in a vast residence, whom 
+habit has accustomed to live in a few only of the countless 
+chambers around them.  We have collected from other parts of our 
+lives mental furniture and bric-a-brac that time and association 
+have endeared to us, have installed these meagre belongings 
+convenient to our hand, and contrived an entrance giving facile 
+access to our living-rooms, avoiding the effort of a long detour 
+through the echoing corridors and disused salons behind.  No 
+acquaintances, and but few friends, penetrate into the private 
+chambers of our thoughts.  We set aside a common room for the 
+reception of visitors, making it as cheerful as circumstances will 
+allow and take care that the conversation therein rarely turns on 
+any subject more personal than the view from the windows or the 
+prophecies of the barometer.
+
+In the old-fashioned brick palace at Kensington, a little suite of 
+rooms is carefully guarded from the public gaze, swept, garnished 
+and tended as though the occupants of long ago were hourly expected 
+to return.  The early years of England's aged sovereign were passed 
+in these simple apartments and by her orders they have been kept 
+unchanged, the furniture and decorations remaining to-day as when 
+she inhabited them.  In one corner, is assembled a group of dolls, 
+dressed in the quaint finery of 1825.  A set of miniature cooking 
+utensils stands near by.  A child's scrap-books and color-boxes lie 
+on the tables.  In one sunny chamber stands the little white-draped 
+bed where the heiress to the greatest crown on earth dreamed her 
+childish dreams, and from which she was hastily aroused one June 
+morning to be saluted as Queen.  So homelike and livable an air 
+pervades the place, that one almost expects to see the lonely 
+little girl of seventy years ago playing about the unpretending 
+chambers.
+
+Affection for the past and a reverence for the memory of the dead 
+have caused the royal wife and mother to preserve with the same 
+care souvenirs of her passage in other royal residences.  The 
+apartments that sheltered the first happy months of her wedded 
+life, the rooms where she knew the joys and anxieties of maternity, 
+have become for her consecrated sanctuaries, where the widowed, 
+broken old lady comes on certain anniversaries to evoke the 
+unforgotten past, to meditate and to pray.
+
+Who, as the year is drawing to its close, does not open in memory 
+some such sacred portal, and sit down in the familiar rooms to live 
+over again the old hopes and fears, thrilling anew with the joys 
+and temptations of other days?  Yet, each year these pilgrimages 
+into the past must become more and more lonely journeys; the 
+friends whom we can take by the hand and lead back to our old homes 
+become fewer with each decade.  It would be a useless sacrilege to 
+force some listless acquaintance to accompany us.  He would not 
+hear the voices that call to us, or see the loved faces that people 
+the silent passages, and would wonder what attraction we could find 
+in the stuffy, old-fashioned quarters.
+
+Many people have such a dislike for any mental privacy that they 
+pass their lives in public, or surrounded only by sporting trophies 
+and games.  Some enjoy living in their pantries, composing for 
+themselves succulent dishes, and interested in the doings of the 
+servants, their companions.  Others have turned their salons into 
+nurseries, or feel a predilection for the stable and the dog-
+kennels.  Such people soon weary of their surroundings, and move 
+constantly, destroying, when they leave old quarters, all the 
+objects they had collected.
+
+The men and women who have thus curtailed their belongings are, 
+however, quite contented with themselves.  No doubts ever harass 
+them as to the commodity or appropriateness of their lodgements and 
+look with pity and contempt on friends who remain faithful to old 
+habitations.  The drawback to a migratory existence, however, is 
+the fact that, as a French saying has put it, CEUX QUI SE REFUSENT 
+LES PENSEES SERIEUSES TOMBENT DANS LES IDEES NOIRES.  These people 
+are surprised to find as the years go by that the futile amusements 
+to which they have devoted themselves do not fill to their 
+satisfaction all the hours of a lifetime.  Having provided no books 
+nor learned to practise any art, the time hangs heavily on their 
+hands.  They dare not look forward into the future, so blank and 
+cheerless does it appear.  The past is even more distasteful to 
+them.  So, to fill the void in their hearts, they hurry out into 
+the crowd as a refuge from their own thoughts.
+
+Happy those who care to revisit old abodes, childhood's remote 
+wing, and the moonlit porches where they knew the rapture of a 
+first-love whisper.  Who can enter the chapel where their dead lie, 
+and feel no blush of self-reproach, nor burning consciousness of 
+broken faith nor wasted opportunities?  The new year will bring to 
+them as near an approach to perfect happiness as can be attained in 
+life's journey.  The fortunate mortals are rare who can, without a 
+heartache or regret, pass through their disused and abandoned 
+dwellings; who dare to open every door and enter all the silent 
+rooms; who do not hurry shudderingly by some obscure corners, and 
+return with a sigh of relief to the cheerful sunlight and murmurs 
+of the present.
+
+Sleepless midnight hours come inevitably to each of us, when the 
+creaking gates of subterranean passages far down in our 
+consciousness open of themselves, and ghostly inhabitants steal out 
+of awful vaults and force us to look again into their faces and 
+touch their unhealed wounds.
+
+An old lady whose cheerfulness under a hundred griefs and 
+tribulations was a marvel and an example, once told a man who had 
+come to her for counsel in a moment of bitter trouble, that she had 
+derived comfort when difficulties loomed big around her by writing 
+down all her cares and worries, making a list of the subjects that 
+harassed her, and had always found that, when reduced to material 
+written words, the dimensions of her troubles were astonishingly 
+diminished.  She recommended her procedure to the troubled youth, 
+and prophesied that his anxieties would dwindle away in the clear 
+atmosphere of pen and paper.
+
+Introspection, the deliberate unlatching of closed wickets, has the 
+same effect of stealing away the bitterness from thoughts that, if 
+left in the gloom of semi-oblivion, will grow until they overshadow 
+a whole life.  It is better to follow the example of England's pure 
+Queen, visiting on certain anniversaries our secret places and 
+holding communion with the past, for it is by such scrutiny only
+
+
+THAT MEN MAY RISE ON STEPPING-STONES
+OF THEIR DEAD SELVES TO HIGHER THINGS.
+
+
+Those who have courage to perform thoroughly this task will come 
+out from the silent chambers purified and chastened, more lenient 
+to the faults and shortcomings of others, and better fitted to take 
+up cheerfully the burdens of a new year.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText Worldly Ways and Byways
+
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